Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

linuxuprising.com

58 pointslogix33 comments

>Widevine is not installed / enabled by default on Raspberry Pi OS though

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...

Is there any info on the level of DRM support? Widevine has multiple levels which means watching Netflix, Hulu, etc on a PC with Chrome will limit your video to 480p or 720p. In some cases, Edge will increase the video resolution to 1080p. I haven't found a way to legally access 4k video on a PC.

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.

Is this true? It seems insane that you cannot watch 4k video on arguably the most powerful platform there is..

If you mean a PC here, some video providers support 4K video to PCs. Netflix do. Amazon don't.

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).

On Windows, in Microsoft's Chrome-based Edge browser, with the HEVC extension installed[1] (might not be required), I see 2160 when I run that command on the test video in that URL. Using an Nvidia graphics card hooked up via HDMI to a 4K TV in HDR mode, with HDCP 2.0 enabled according to the TV.

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...

It will be Level 3, so limited.

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.)

This is reminiscent, for me, of the days of unskippable DVD ads and generally terrible DVD/Blu-ray experiences. Downloading a movie would give you a clean file with no ads and you could seek wherever without limits but purchasing a legal copy would give you a terrible experience. This kind of DRM and limitations feels so incredibly stupid when you can find high quality 1080p/4K rips of content from every major streaming platforms. So as it stands right now you can bend over backwards to get some support for Widevine to stream low quality OR you can download the full 4K with zero restrictions.

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.

Is this level 1 or level 3? If it's level 3 you'd only get 720p on netflix.

AFAIK level 3 doesn’t need hardware support. It is always available in a compatible software player (e.g. official Chrome build).

It has to be level 3, since Google Chrome on Linux desktops (not sure about other platforms) only supports level 3.

Edit: see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60833060/why-desktop-chr...

It looks like this has been available unofficially for a while: https://gist.github.com/teacupx/9393507ad6250429707f0318b04f...

Do you have to hand over your whole privacy to google and agree to them collecting data from your grandchildren when installing?

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]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26035441

It's not installed by default, users need to install it (sudo apt install libwidevinecdm0). Previously it wasn't available at all though, at least not in an official way.

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...

There‘s all kinds of uses for a Raspberry Pi. Not everyone is in it for ideological reasons, and I‘d argue just watching Netflix on it is a valid use case too.

I'd think privacy concerns over data collection aren't ideological, more ethical.

No data is being collected by the possibility of installing a DRM plug-in, which I understood the grandparent comment to be in objection to.

Preinstalling the plug-in would be an entirely different matter for me, and I'd see the ethical concerns there.

Is it?

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.

Not as a primary use case, of course. But if somebody wants to buy exactly one cheap single-board computer, why should they be prevented from being able to watch "non-free" content on it (as long as the DRM required to play it is strictly optional and does not come preinstalled)?

Chromecast still requires another device to send the video to it. Using a media serving device like a pi can mean you avoid tying up another device and the whole solution winds up being just like any other media system attached to your TV. Remote control, and interface.

I don't think that's how Chromecast always works (though it can work that way).

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.

> a Fire Stick or a Chromecast

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.

But in this case a Pi is literally worse than either of those things at doing the video playback use case for the same investment. It's not a case of the Pi being as good but doing other things, you compromise the use case.

When the cheese is higher quality and cheaper with scrip, then regular money isn't "objectively better". It's a tradeoff and suggesting someone use scrip to buy cheese is quite reasonable.

Raspberry Pi has basically forever shipped closed components, that's not some "new trend"...

That makes a rpi more useful as a set-top box. I use an old laptop and a Roku now, and this might work better if performance is any good. My old Roku can barely keep up with the new versions of Amazon's channel.

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.

no 4k but that's ok because the rpi4 would overheat and throttle itself if it even hardware accelerated it anyway

The numbers in google say that 1080p decoding is a quarter watt so 4k would probably be fine.

i reckon it is fine if there is proper hw decoding. i gave up trying and got a different sbc that works flawlessly hw decoding 4k with no heatsinks so far (vim3L)

tl;dr Install libwidevinecdm0 and Chromium receives Widevine support.

It seems to be only in the armhf repo - not available for aarch64.

AFAIK there are no aarch64 widevine binaries out there since chromeOS doesn't have an aarch64 variant.

The kernel ABI for recent ARM devices is aarch64 according to this: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...

I suppose they could still be running armhf userland, but that'd be a little odd.

They still run an armhf userland for Chrome OS, yes. See the User ABI column.

Fantastic, now I can watch 4K movies and shows at 720p in a frame-dropping stuttering mess. Thanks Google!

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