Two hacks came to light last night that enable the overly excitable to grab streaming and rented movies for longer than the alloted time period. First, you can add a bit of Greasemonkey code to Mozilla to download streaming video from Netflix.

1. install the Greasemonkey add-on for firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748. restart firefox after installing.

2. unzip the attachment from this post onto your desktop. drag the unzipped .js file into your firefox window. click Install when prompted.

3. go to netflix.com and try out your new and enhanced Watch Instantly section. pretty slick, eh?

Easy enough. It simply adds a download button to Netflix. Not something Netflix probably wanted, but whatevs. Then they’ve discovered that if you set your system date to years in the past you can essentially keep rented movies indefinitely. This might be a good hack if a movie is about to expire but it doesn’t sound so nice in the long term. They keep trying to make a buck and we keep thwarting their evil plans.

Shitburger’s Netflix hack
iTunes rentals and the system date [TUAW]