Bypass Netflix 'Watch Now' time limit

vee_anon writes: "I've discovered a method for viewing Netflix 'Watch Now' movies without having it deduct time from your account. Additionally, you can also choose whatever quality video you want to view without being limited to what Netflix determines.

Here is how:

1. Login to Netflix with IE (or Firefox using the UserAgent spoofer) and goto the Watch Now tab. Choose whatever movie you want and click Play.
2. After the Netflix movie loads you get the popup box prompting you to accept the license and click play. Don't click play — click Cancel instead.
3. You will now see this message: "Windows Media Player has experienced an error: MediaError(0)"
4. Right click on the webpage, somewhere outside of the video player and choose 'View Source' and you should get the source code of the webpage opened in Notepad.
5. Do a find/search for: var WNPlaylistMovie
   This will be about midway down in the code.
6. If you scroll to the right, you will start to see the URL's of the actual movie files, in increasing order of their quality. So the first one is the worst quality (about 100MB to download) and keep scrolling to the right and the last one will be the highest quality (about 1.4GB to download)
   
   The url of the movie will look something like this:http://index.ehub.netflix.com/item?x=U8wlKQQS AYM_Hlg-1Z094oB-wVes8acegEJe01iGIoE5Mpn1O4prcUs_Fs wmVi2X6Ze7rNzN-4i0ky2B0aHrQl4U01uCXZRpnB4 .
7. Just copy and paste the URL's like this into a new browser window address bar. It will either prompt you to download the files, or open them automatically in Windows Media Player.
8. If they open in Windows Media Player just accept the license agreement that pops up and then goto File > Save Media As... and you will now be able to save it to your hard drive.

This has been tested will multiple movies and has been verified not to subtract any time from your account if you download them and view them or stream them through Windows Media Player, which leads me to believe the time tracking of the viewing is done through the embedded Netflix Video Player. Also, since these files are DRM'd you will still need to have a valid Netflix account to watch them but it does get you around the quality limitations. Netflix has been notified about this poor system design, but has not responded."