Netflix and Spotify on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Chromium and Widevine

How do projects like this work?

https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

> was never given a proper replacement

The eSDK replaces it, but it's basically partners-only.

I remember that they'd pack the executable with Themida with the highest possible settings in order to complicate reverse engineering.

Not really a huge hurdle nowadays, but they used to have the VM and anti-debug detection ratcheted up all the way and it would trigger when I had IDA open. (I believe it was a findwindow check)

I wonder if there'll be a renewed push for this in the next decade. At the moment it's pretty pointless given the widespread continued existence of headphone jacks which have a pretty big analog hole, not to mention the continued existence of stores selling DRM free protests after the backlash in the 00s

> because they do not even attempt to sync to the screen refresh rate

I don’t disagree with that, but I think the underlying reason is X server protocol. It’s hard to implement vsync properly when there’s a socket connecting application to display server.

On Windows, various GPU APIs and even parts of the GPU driver are DLLs loaded into the process. DLL functions don’t have latency and API designers don’t need to consider that (except stuff that have good reasons for latency, e.g. asynchronous draw/compute/copy calls). Works quite well in practice, I don’t remember screen tearing issues on Win10 unless I explicitly disable vsync, e.g. with DXGI_PRESENT_ALLOW_TEARING flag. Most apps don’t do that and don’t tear.

The problem statement “implement proper vsync” only looks easy on the surface. If one considers all the hairy details, a good implementation gonna affect many components of the OS, not just GUI related also power management and others. Otherwise it gonna introduce presentation latency (especially bad for online games), consume much more RAM and VRAM, and/or waste too much electricity (especially bad for laptops).

> If you tell the compositor to fuck of by overriding the windows redirect state or have a compositor that at least detects full screen windows

If a developer is in a position to replace OS components, that’s probably an embedded environment. For that case DRM/KMS combo is already flawless, at least according to my experience. That’s not just on Pi4, I’ve developed stuff for a few other ARM SoCs, too.

Desktop software developers can’t replace OS components or ask users to do so. They need something that works out of the box, is reliable and efficient.

I’m not an expert in Linux graphics, but I spent about a day trying to fix that but failed.

eglSwapInterval does nothing. The GPU driver exposes no *_swap_control extensions anywhere. There’re 3 extendable parts, EGL, GLES client and GLES server with many extensions each, but nothing resembling GLX_EXT_swap_control/GLX_MESA_swap_control/GLX_SGI_swap_control.

Other applications on that Pi4 who render many FPS (web browser or VLC player) also have screen tearing. I assume these people know way more about Linux GPU stuff, yet they failed too.

Do you have an advice how I can do that on that Pi4, with EGL 1.1 and GLES 3.1?

P.S. Based on the internets, the problem was introduced in Pi4. In earlier versions things were good.

See also: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11815

That’s the only way to combat piracy, sadly Spotify is becoming worse and worse, they ruined radio a few years back and over the past year they’ve also ruined discover weekly and your daily mixes it’s the same songs on repeat now, and the mixes are just becoming weirder and weirder they seem to broken down genre barriers completely I have Weird Al, Rammstein and MCR popping up in the same daily mix.

They’ve stopped rotating their curated playlists and made discovering playlists more and more annoying.

I’ve stopped paying for Spotify because of that and now primarily use Amazon Music Unlimited for music on the go but it also now started to have issues with too tracks becoming unavailable day in and day out.

I wish Pandora would become available outside of the US or Spotify Stations (I don’t know if it’s good, I’ve used Pandora back when they didn’t geoblock their services) because I want to be able to discover music.

Since the lockdown in the UK I’ve went back to using Internet Radio, my Yamaha Music Cast receiver has a good directory and it’s so far been a much better daily listening experience than Spotify.

I might give Napster and Deezer a try since they are supported by my main music setup at home too.

> every single track on spotify is trivial to find a torrent for yet no one bothers torrenting since spotify is cheap and very convenient

The bit about "every single track" isn't true. It's hard to find torrents for older, more obscure things.

Your general take is right, though. It's easier to pay Spotify $10 per month than to go to the effort of torrenting, cataloging, transferring to your device, etc.

Chrome does so as well.

So they serve two versions of every file, one for browsers using Widevine's scheme and another for everything else using their own scheme? And the benefit of Widevine is that it's a closed-source blob shipped with the browser itself (or not, as is the fundamental issue solved by the OP) rather than some obfuscated javascript, so you have zero access to it? At least until it ultimately writes PCM to the soundcard where you can then do what you want with it.