Pipelight is a special browser plugin which allows one to use Windows-only plugins inside NPAPI plugin-compatible *nix browsers. We are currently focusing on Silverlight, Flash, Shockwave and the Unity Webplayer. The project needs a patched version of WINE to execute the plugins.
Pipelight requires a *nix operating system (such as Linux or FreeBSD) running on an x86 (e.g. AMD or Intel) processor. Most non-mobile computers use an x86 processor.
Pipelight Requires a browser that supports NPAPI plugins.
Firefox versions under 52 work (as does the Firefox 52 ESR). After that, NPAPI plugins are disabled for everything but Flash.
SeaMonkey versions under 2.50 support NPAPI plugins. SeaMonkey 2.50 nightlies still support both Flash and Silverlight plugins.
Palemoon pledges to support NPAPI plugins indefinitely.
Webkit still supports NPAPI plugins, so you can use browsers such as Midori and Uzbl without a problem. However, these browsers may need to run the plugins in external windows (put embed = no in your configuration file or set the PIPELIGHT_EMBED environment variable to 0).
Chrome/Chromium versions under 34 work. You'll have to apply a couple patches to get Chromium versions 34 or higher to work. Similarly, other browsers based on Chromium 34+, like Opera 15+ and Vivaldi, won't work.
Older versions of Opera use Presto rather than Blink, so you can use Opera versions under 15 without a problem.
To install, you must compile WINE with the WINE Staging patches, compile Pipelight, and enable the required plugins.
See also Gentoo's Netflix/Pipelight Wiki page for some tips and troubleshooting advice.
Unfortunately, Michael Müller, the initiator of the project, has given up on the project and has removed the repositories for supported distributions. One must now compile from source, which isn't difficult.
Unfortunately, services like Netflix detect one's browser instead of the browser's capabilities, so you may need to install a user-agent switcher.
If you use Uzbl and have the per-site settings script loaded, you can add this to $XDG_DATA_HOME/uzbl/per-site-settings:
.netflix.com
.*
set useragent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 @(+sh -c "pipelight-plugin --version | sed -e 's/\\s\\+/\\//g'")@
If your interest is merely to watch Netflix (the original purpose of Pipelight), you can try an app like Netflix Penguin, so that you won't have to install such an extension in your browser.
Microsoft has deprecated Silverlight and now streaming services are increasingly using HTML5 with EME. For such streaming services to work, you must use a browser that supports EME with the proper DRM plugin (usually Widevine). Such browsers include Google Chrome (37 or higher) and official builds of Firefox (52 or higher). Unfortunately, Chromium and other browsers based on it (Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) don't support EME, as they lack Google's proprietary DRM code. Similarly, only the prebuilt versions of Firefox from the Mozilla website support EME, but those built by yourself or by your distribution don't.