How desperate are you to get Netflix running on your iPhone? Desperate enough to jailbreak, grab frameworks from your iPad,
and do some plist hacking? If the answer to those questions is "yes," then the folks at ModMyi have something they'd like to show you. According to the site, a tipster has been able to get the video streaming service up and playing on an iPhone by making what appears to be fairly simple changes to his device; namely, boosting the iPad's MediaPlayer.framework and altering plist settings once the app was installed on his phone. It's not all wine and roses, as using Netflix where
it's not supposed to be used causes a massive battery drain (go figure), and there are issues with crashing and 3G playback (two more unsurprising problems). Still, it can be done, and this is just the start -- so if you want to get in on the party (and maybe even help out a little bit), hit the read link and see what it's all about.
Update: Cody tells us the powers that be have already disabled this little gem of a workaround. We have to hand it to you, powers that be -- that was mighty quick for a Memorial Day weekend.
[Thanks, Cody]
posted May 30th 2010 1:58PM
Damn the powers that be!
It becomes more and more obvious that the only reason Jobs doesn't like flash, you tube or netflix is simply to justify his battery fetish. ergo, his hardware is actually no more battery wise than any other device, so the answer is to go on a campaign to stamp out anyone who dares make his devices work for a living
@Anixia that doesn't even make sense. apple hates youtube, yet they have a native app on the ipad, iphone and ipod touch to support it. they hate netflix, yet again, they have an ipad app for it.
if you want your battery to die in 1 hour by using this netflix hack (when you could), then you obviously need some sort of brain transplant.
yet again you're wrong about the battery. apple is notorious for having the shittiest battery life in their devices. go ahead and use the droid for 2 days, while i charge my iphone every 18 hours.
"..., as using Netflix where it's not supposed to be used causes a massive battery drain..."
Except when Netflix was running on the Windows7 Phone battery, crashing, or performance wasn't an issue...
For netflix to work on the iPad the video has to be encoded server side and repackaged using Microsoft technology since the iPad and iPhone doesn't support VC1 the standard codec that Netflix uses.
Too bad Apple doesn't support more codec choices for their users so that content like this is a) hard to do b) impossible on their devices.
It really isn't about battery, it is about what the devices are designed to support and the iPhone has no hardware decoding methods for these types of video and the OS has no layers to offer support for anything beyond the basic 1,2,3 solution of audio type, video type that only Apple provides.
Apple could have made the iPhone easily support hardware decoding of higher quality video/codecs but then Apple wouldn't have complete control of the content the users are 'allowed' to see/use.
Battery is really just a simple engineering trick and what they want to support in hardware and in the OS, and Apple doesn't give a crap about anything that doesn't come from their cash cow iTunes. PERIOD.