To be precise it is "The only officially supported way to use Widevine on Linux is using Chrome on an x86_64 CPU using glibc."
In other words, even though I have x86_64 cpu, since I'm on alpine, I'm fucked anyway.
(also how are you even using alpine for desktop. I tried to look it up once and gave up soon)
Paying money and having to install a proprietary browser and run proprietary software to stream low-quality video (not download, or move to a different device), if the company deems it available to you at that particular place and time.
Meanwhile torrents let you start watching most content in under 30s, at whichever quality you'd like, in a convenient mkv you can stick anywhere.
No thanks. I'll stick to patreon and buying albums to assuage my guilty conscience and reward content creators.
So they have a working version of this internally obviously. I guess they just don't ship it stand-alone?
> Earlier, I said that 'Widevine-in-Chrome-on-Linux-on-aarch64' is not an officially supported platform.
> I lied.
> Chromebooks exist, many have aarch64 CPUs, they run Chrome on Linux (more or less), and they officially support Widevine.
The whole post is worth a read. Its pretty sort and well written!
And no, glibc really only work with its own dynamic loader (ld.so), and it has to be with same version.
Widevine is a plugin-like .so meant to be loaded into Chrome/Chromium. Because it uses glibc, the entire process hosting it must use glibc. So, what prevents me from ALSO HAVING GLIBC CHROMIUM instead of musl Chromium? Nothing, but I hope you get that it propagates further and it's a horrible idea to just glibc everything on Alpine.
Sure, but you need it for Chromium alone iirc, no?
>Because it uses glibc, the entire process hosting it must use glibc. So, what prevents me from ALSO HAVING GLIBC CHROMIUM instead of musl Chromium? Nothing, but I hope you get that it propagates further and it's a horrible idea to just glibc everything on Alpine.
Well, don't glibc everything. Just Chromium and its dependencies. How does it "propagate further"? It's not like libraries leak outside where they're told to load!
I want to use the distro (Alpine) packaged Chromium, which links to musl. Not some random Chromium build I found on the Internet. Having to use a glibc Chromium is already too far for me.
Do you suggest that in order to support Widevine, a distro (Alpine) should also build Chromium, Firefox and co also with glibc instead of the default (musl), or provide two varaints?
Even when they have a Chromium with musl as libc working perfectly fine, except no proprietary DRM support?
I'm okay with running a proprietary binary, linked to glibc, by installing the glibc alongside. I'm not okay with having to randomly change other packages already in my system (in this case, my browser) to glibc variant.
Edit: Oh, and anything Chromium depends on have to had a glibc variant.
Yes, absolutely.
I'm not suggesting that it's a good thing that this is needed.
But I do suggest that it needs to be done.
Will, in the sense that, otherwise, people running Alpine will have to say "OK, as it is, we can forget Widevine and Netflix/Spotify" and leave it at that.
That said, since this is something many Alpine users will want, I'd expect to be some known "semi-official" or "reputable third party" build for this, not just "some random Chromium found on the Internet".
If not, personally I'd skip Alpine.
>Even when they have a Chromium with musl as libc working perfectly fine, except no proprietary DRM support?
Well, even then, since this doesn't change the fact that Widevine and thus Spotify/Netflix wont work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/muoqis/comment/g...
> In the instance of Chrome, the browser doesn't implement the DRM itself, but delegates it to a native library referred to as a CDM (Content Decryption Module).
> This library is an opaque proprietary blob that we are forbidden to look inside of (at least, that's how they'd prefer it to be).
> Graciously, as part of the Chromium project, Google provides the C++ headers required to interface with The Blob. This interface allows other projects like Firefox to implement support for Widevine, via the EME API, using the exact same libwidevinecdm.so blob as Chrome does.