Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support(linuxuprising.com) |
Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support(linuxuprising.com) |
it looks like the raspbian team got it right this time as opposed to secretly loading a GPG key and repository into everyone's OS to deliver a feature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_OS#Microsoft_Repo...
I'm guessing the same limits apply on the RPi.
You can test this by going to a video page like https://www.netflix.com/watch/80018585 and typing `document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].videoHeight` to see the size of the actual video stream.
I'm not interested in a discussion on the morality of downloading content, just pointing out how backwards the experience is even when you pay. I'd gladly pay $100+/mo for the experience you can achieve via piracy but it doesn't exist and that's a pretty sad state of things. Spotify(/Amazon/Apple/etc), largely, "solved" piracy by providing a great experience for an affordable price, making it so that it was actually more expensive and more work to pirate music. TV/Movies still doesn't have a spotify-equivalent which sucks.
Even things like Apple TV (The app, not the service or the product, <insert eyeroll emoji>) and Amazon Channels, that both attempt to tackle this problem by unifying multiple "feeds" into 1 app/experience, both fall short and don't have nearly the breadth of content I'd want.
Widevine levels are based on hardware support for features, and I can't really see any way the Raspberry Pi could ever have a closed protected video path for example. Indeed, all Widevine Level 1 devices are either closed devices with signed bootloaders (TVs), or with a Google written OS (Chromebooks) or both (Android phones).
(Also, where Edge gets higher resolution it's generally because it is using Microsoft's PlayReady as a Content Decryption Module, not Widevine. And on Windows PlayReady can access the APIs to check those similar hardware level features.)
I've also had success streaming 4K using the Netflix app for Windows, as well as using Safari on a Mac. A 4K plan from Netflix is also required.
That said, when I tried to stream HBO Max or Disney+ in 4K HDR10 from the same web browser, I wasn't able to. Best I could get was 1080p, I think, for either. For those other services, I had to stream instead using my TV or set-top box to get full resolution and full HDR quality.
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/hevc-video-extensions/9nmz...
But the hardware has to support PlayReady SL3000 (or Fairplay on a modern Mac), expose that to the relevant parts of the OS and have an HDCP 2.2 chain to the monitor (and all monitors).
Edit: see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60833060/why-desktop-chr...
On a serious note I thought Widevine was closed sourced and only licensed in some way, how has it made its way to Raspberry Pi OS without any consents and such? Is it libre? Or is this the new direction of the raspberry foundation to cooperate with big corps? Like when they included the Microsoft apt repository so that people can install vscode in 1 command instead of 4. [0]
I mean, it's still not very good at it - you will only get lower resolutions, and at this point a Raspberry Pi and storage/power/cases are not cheaper than buying a Fire Stick or a Chromecast which works better for that use case.
These are some unofficial ways of getting Widevine on a Pi (no longer needed now): https://gist.github.com/ruario/19a28d98d29d34ec9b184c42e5f8b... https://blog.vpetkov.net/2020/03/30/raspberry-pi-netflix-one...
For Firefox, Mozilla published two months ago: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/porting-firefox-to-apple-s... which involves some Apple-specific tricks, which makes me not hopeful Firefox on Arm on Linux will support DRM soon.
It seems to be only in the armhf repo - not available for aarch64.
I suppose they could still be running armhf userland, but that'd be a little odd.
Preinstalling the plug-in would be an entirely different matter for me, and I'd see the ethical concerns there.
Most of the time, your device(s) tell the Chromecast what to play, and the Chromecast plays that on its own. There is integration which tries to sync the UI on the "controlling" device to the playback of the Chromecast but this fails often enough for me that it's clear that (in my case) my phone isn't streaming to the Chromecast directly unless I'm screen mirroring.
Corporate scrip is essentially fine too if all you care about is buying cheese (and you can exchange it for cheese...), but that doesn't mean that it's good or that regular money isn't objectively better.