[PS3] Can’t login to the PSN? Here’s how you can still access Netflix

A good friend of mine contacted me recently because his PS3 got banned from Sony’s PSN. He owns a PS3 for the sole purpose of playing Videos and music, and mostly runs Showtime (a media player Homebrew, far better than the official PS3 video player) and Netflix. If the default video player on the PS3 was decent, he wouldn’t have to run a CFW at all. As a matter of fact, he never played a single game on his PS3. Nevertheless, he woke up one day seeing that he couldn’t connect to the PSN anymore.

On a side note, this means that if your run a CFW, Sony will indiscriminately ban you, independently of the fact that you pirate games or cheat online.

Not having a PSN connection could have been a non issue, as I said, this friend never played or use any Sony product on his PS3 besides the PS3 hardware. Unfortunately for him, there’s a strange requirement to be logged in to the PSN if you want to run Netflix. Don’t ask me why, that’s the way it works. My friend was therefore left with the choice of giving up on Showtime, uninstall his CFW, and try to convince Sony to unban his account; or to stay on CFW and give up on Netflix.

But he’s quite resourceful and found a way to get Netflix to work without having to be logged in to the PSN. The basic technique is to let Netflix believe that the PSN is down. This technique is already well known from people who want to avoid being banned for using CFW (which is what my friend should have done in the first place…).

When Netflix believes the PSN is down, it will let you login without a problem. In order to do that, my friend blocked the following connections from his router (this list comes from psx-scene):

fus01.ps3.update.playstation.net > Update Server (sys updates)
mercury.dl.playstation.net > What’s new ads
nsx.np.dl.playstation.net > playstation store preview
nsx-e.np.dl.playstation.net > ads
(main file exchange connections)
us.np.stun.playstation.net > on boot initiates connection
ena.net.playstation.net > SSLv3 connection after above connection
dus01.ps3.update.playstation.net > secondary update attempt (could force updates)
auth.np.ac.playstation.net > SSLv3 authentication server
(destination servers)
service.playstation.net (has multiple IPs if only the ip address is blocked)
(Error Reporting)
creepo.ww.hl.playstation.net (uploads crash reports etc.)

Since he lives in JP (and that was the trick here), he had to additionally block the following addresses:

djp01.ps3.update.playstation.net
jp.np.stun.playstation.net

This takes care of the use case in JP and the US. People in the EU might have to sniff network traffic in order to get additional addresses specific to their country.

Note: some people have contacted me with a technique that simply consists in “cancelling” the login step on the PSN several times in a row. That technique seems so far to be extremely random… feel free to give it a try as it is way simpler than blocking traffic on your router, but be aware that the results are not guaranteed. Report your feedback in the comments section

Netflix and Amazon Instant Video are probably the 2 best video on demand services, and they’re available on the PS3. Sadly, by default they are only available to people in the US. But I’ve been enjoying the US Netflix service and Amazon Instant Video on my PS3 from Japan for a while now . If you are interested in accessing these services on your PS3 from any country, check our sister site’s tutorial on how to access Netflix from any country on your PS3