NetFlix For iPad Played on iPhone. Now Disabled.

If you are a member and an avid user of NetFlix, you might have gotten wind that the company has an application on the App Store for the iPad. However, there are some of you out there [or plenty] who wish to use the NetFlix service on your iPhone or iPod touch. Well, some investigation on the matter has been done by a hacker which discovered that the existing application for the iPad is actually written with universal binary coding. This means that the application can identify what iDevice you are using, and the app will transform itself to the proper version accordingly.

Most likely, NetFlix has disabled the iPhone and iPod touch versions of the application to finish developing that aspect of the software. However, if you have the application for the iPad, are a member of the NetFlix service and would like to watch all those movies on your iPhone OS device [other than your iPad], the source shares a way in which you can [or could have] utilize this version of the app. Jail-breaking of your iPhone or iPod touch will be necessary in your effort to successfully get the application up and running on your device. Below is the procedure given and the images to prove that the app is indeed universally compatible.

Maybe not all iPad apps can be run on the iPhone. Turns out the Netflix iPad app appears to have a native iPhone app bundled in with the iPad app, hence the ability to make it work on the iPhone and the different layout for the iPhone etc.

To do this yourself…

¢ Get app from iTunes, locate/rename ipa to zip and extract.

¢ Go into the .app file, located at /appname/Payload/appname.app, (show package contents) and open the info.plist

¢ Edit all references of OS version to show iphoneos3.1.2 (or your respective version). Save and close, done there.

Now, just copied over SSH (with permissions repair and a respring) this will show up on the phone. With Netflix though, it required the mediaplayer frameworks from the iPad. So:

¢ SSH, get the mediaplayer frameworks folder from an iPad, located at /System/Library/Frameworks/MediaPlayer.framework

¢ Copy that to the same location on an iPhone (I’d suggest backing up the original from your phone just in case). Change permissions to 755 recursive for directories, and then go inside the folder and change the individual file permissions to 644. (Or just recursive 755 to all files/folders on the MediaPlayer.framework folder)

Now the mediaplayer frameworks are in place, all that’s left is a manual install of the app.

¢ SSH, go to /private/var/stash/Applications

¢ Copy the appname.app file there and change permissions. (I used 777 recursive for simplicity’s sake, but I’m sure the normal 775 would work).

¢ Launch and have fun.

That’s about it. The way I found out that I needed the frameworks file was from a crash report.

The source does mention that being that the app is not polished yet for your iPhone or iPod touch, it comes with a set of problems. The NetFlix app does drain the battery life when it is active. He also mentions that the application does crash quite a bit and that it does stream content of 3G networking, but the performance of the device is greatly slowed.

NetFlix has since disabled the ability of the app being used in the underworld that is the jail-breaking community. The deactivating of the application is rather quick from the powers that be being that it was all done in a short amount of time on Memorial Day. It has been speculated that Netfix is working on optimizing the application for distribution in the wake of the new iPhone that is set to debut at WWDC next week.

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