[Nix-dev] chromium widevine CDM

Mathijs Kwik mathijs at bluescreen303.nl
Mon Sep 15 15:35:54 CEST 2014


Hi all,

Recently, netflix enabled support for the chrome browser, running on
linux. This means it should now be possible to watch netflix without
silverlight in pure HTML5 video. This became possible because w3c's
controversial EME (encrypted media extensions) which enables netflix to
enforce DRM schemes.

Chrome 37 and higher have full support for EME, but EME is only an
interface which plugs into the actual DRM component. The key component
for this scheme is called "widevine CDM", which is also used by youtube
for some content. It turns out that the widevine technology was acquired
by google and also used for android and chromeOS video streaming.

This CDM component is part of the official chrome distribution, but from
googling a bit I found it should have been part of chromium by default
as well now. I checked our stable, beta and dev releases, but
chrome://components does not show it.

I suspect we need to (optionally) enable extra flags during building,
but I'm not familiar with the build process. Can someone please give me
some pointers? it appears there is a
"third_party/widevine/cdm/widevine_cdm.gyp" file in our sources, so that
should probably be included somehow.

Thanks,
Mathijs



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