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Tag: chromium (Page 18 of 20)

Watch Netflix video in your chromium browser – this time for real

January 2, 2015 / / 32 Comments

chromium_icon

I have made change to my Chromium package which some of you will find interesting. As you might know (I wrote about it in an earlier article here on Alien Pastures) Google and Netflix combined their efforts and that resulted in native support in Chrome for the playback of Netflix videos, using the Widevine Content Decryption Module (CDM) which is incidentally also owned by Google. This was all made possible using the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in a HTML5 player. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a way to add this Widevine CDM support to my Chromium package – using a similar approach to the way I add support for Flash using the binary libraries taken from the official Chrome RPM.

Then my Slackware buddy ppr:kut pointed me to a discussion in the Chromium bugtracker on Google Code where someone stated he had found the solution. The description was a bit vague, no patches were posted, but the general concept was clear.

I proceeded with updating my SlackBuild for chromium-dev (which is currently at version 41.0.2236.0) and re-writing my not-working widevine patch. That resulted in a new chromium-dev package which reported that a Widevine plugin was available. Alas… when opening a Netflix page and attempting to play a video, this only resulted in the error “M7363-1262-00000000” which seems to have a relation to a mismatch between the Widevine CDM library and the browser. A possible explanation could be that I used the Widevine CDM library from stable Chrome 39.0.2171.95 in that build of the chromium development version 41.

So, my next attempt was to rebuild the stable chromium package (39.0.2171.95) with the Widevine patch, using the Widevine CDM library from the Chrome RPM bearing that same version. And what do you know… success!

I can now watch Netflix video’s in my Slackware chromium browser. How nice is that.

Apparently, having a functional Widevine CDM support will allow you to watch Youtube Movies as well, but since I already pay for Netflix I did not want to test these Youtube rentals. Another test which failed was my attempt to watch television on horizon.tv, the content streaming network of my provider (UPC/Liberty Global). Even with a UserAgent spoofer and all browser cookies removed, that site still detected that I was visiting using a Chrome/Chromium browser and kept presenting an annoying popup to force me to switch to a different browser because Chrome does not support Silverlight anymore (on Mac OSX and Windows 64-bit at least, remember their NPAPI depreciation). No way around that, even though I was fairly sure that Horizon TV also used Widevine for Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the past. Guess I still have to use Firefox with Pipelight for that, then.

What do you need in order to watch Netflix in Chromium on Slackware (14.1 and -current)?

  • Just two packages are needed: chromium and chromium-widevine-plugin. The latest chromium package was rebuilt to enbable support for Widevine. The chromium package itself does not contain any proprietary binaries. The chromium-widevine-plugin package is what contains the “libwidevinecdm.so” library which was extracted from the official binary Chrome RPM – this is proprietary software.
  • It is not necessary to use a UserAgent spoofer. Netflix works out of the box.
  • Make sure your mozilla-nss package has at least version 3.16.4 (Pat Volkerding upgraded all mozilla-nss packages in recent Slackware releases for this reason)
  • In Netflix Playback-settings chose HTML5

Note 1:

No more changes are needed to the file “/etc/default/chromium”. The plugin is announced to chromium by means of the “libwidevinecdmadapter.so” library which is built from the Open Source code in the chromium tarball, but only in the presence of the proprietary “libwidevinecdm.so”. Installing or upgrading the chromium-widevine-plugin package will show a few lines of warning if it detects that you still have the old configuration block enclosed by “START chromium-widevine-plugin” and “END chromium-widevine-plugin“. You should delete that block now.

Note 2:

If you don’t care about Netflix or don’t want to install any non-free software, then the chromium package is still OK for you – just don’t install chromium-widevine-plugin and you’ll be fine. If you even want to get rid of any hint of Widevine support you can always recompile the package with the variable “USE_CDM” inside the chromium.SlackBuild set to zero (0). That will prevent the creation of the (open source) adapter library “libwidevinecdmadapter.so”.

Have fun! Eric

New chromium and chromium-dev packages

December 11, 2014 / / 5 Comments

chromium_iconMy previous post already mentioned the updated chromium sources. I have now compiled those into Slackware packages (for 14.1 and -current).

For the curious among you, I have additionally refreshed my chromium-dev packages. Chromium-dev is the development release of the browser (there’s also a “beta” channel but I don’t care about that too much). By play-testing the development release from time to time, I am prepared and do not get nasty surprises when the stable channel jumps to a higher major release (the jump from 38 to 39 was quite intrusive in terms of SlackBuild script).

Chromium-dev packages have the version number 41.0.2236.0. (and are only made available for slackware-current). The version of the stable Chromium is now at 39.0.2171.95.

Get the Chromium packages in one of the usual locations:

Change “chromium” to “chromium-dev” and you have the URL for the development release.

Eric

Adobe Flash update time – december

December 9, 2014 / / 8 Comments

A quick notice about the latest Flash updates released by Adobe today:

I updated my chromium-pepperflash-plugin package for Slackware 14.1 and -current. I’ll start working on an updated Chromium package for Slackware as soon as the new sources come online. You can read more on Google’s Chrome blog. The new version of the PepperFlash plugin (binaries extracted from the Google Chrome 39.0.2171.95 RPMs) is 16.0.0.235.

An update for the “legacy” Flash player plugin for Linux, aka the NPAPI plugin for Mozilla-compatible browsers is available as well. The updated flashplayer-plugin package bears the version 11.2.202.425.

For my pipelight package, you can easily update the Windows plugins it installed for you earlier (including the Windows Flash player if you use that) by running (as root) the script:

# pipelight-plugin --update

A new package is not required therefore.

Adobe’s monthly security bulletin has all the information about this Flash update.

Eric

Flash plugins updated – second time in November

November 26, 2014 / / 3 Comments

Chromium and Pepper Flash:

Yesterday, there waschromium_icon a new Flash from Adobe. The second time in November, and this time Google accompanies it with an update of their Chrome browser (version 39.0.2171.71) which contains the new PepperFlash plugin. I extracted that plugin from the Chrome binaries and put it into an updated chromium-pepperflash-plugin package for Slackware 14.1 and -current.. Because of the new Chrome release, there’s also a new release of Chromium’s “stable channel” meaning an updated Chromium package for Slackware is on its way as well. You can read more on Google’s Chrome blog.

The new version of the PepperFlash plugin is 15.0.0.239. Test the success of your package upgrade on Adobe’s “About Flash” page (remember to close your Chromium browser before applying the upgrade).

Linux Flash:

adobe_flash_8s600x600_2 I also packaged the “legacy” Flash player pligin for Linux, aka the NPAPI plugin for Mozilla-compatible browsers. Adobe’s monthly security bulletin has all the information. The new version for my Linux flashplayer-plugin package is 11.2.202.424.

As an aside, it is interesting to read that Google has delayed the “depreciation of NPAPI” from their Chrome/Chromium browser. In our Linux versions of Chrome/Chromium, all support for NPAPI has already been removed in the summer of this year, but despite Google’s claim with statistics showing that the usage of NPAPI has been on a steady decline, they seem to have enough opposition from the Windows camp that their original plan (eradicate NPAPI from Chrome at the end of 2014) is not coming to pass. All of that is irrelevant to us Linux users, so anyway, who cares?

 

Pipelight with Windows Flash:

pipelight-logoFor my pipelight package, you can easily update the Windows plugins it installed for you earlier (including the Windows Flash player if you use that) by running (as root) the script:

# pipelight-plugin --update

A new package is not required therefore.

 

Eric

LibreOffice, Chromium news

October 11, 2014 / / 19 Comments

I had a couple of busy weeks at work, and even though I managed to get some updated packages out the door, there was no opportunity to write about them earlier. I bought a ChromeCast and played with that instead to force myself to stay awake after dinner. So, what was new in the last two weeks?

LibreOffice:

Right before LibreOffice turned four years old, The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice 4.3.2. Belated happy birthday to the project! More than 80 fixes went into this minor release, with a focus on interoperability issues when reading or writing Microsoft Office (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) files.

My previous article which I wrote for LibreOffice 4.3.1 has some additional info on the 4.3 series, should you not have read it before.

LibreOffice 4.3.2 packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready for download from the usual mirror locations:

If there is anyone who has a solution for LibreOffice being incapable to ignore the system harfbuzz library and use an internal version instead… please let me know. It annoys the hell out of me that I can not use the updated harfbuzz in my ‘ktown‘ repository without breaking LibreOffice.

Chromium:

chromium_iconA couple of days ago Chromium stable was updated to 38.0.2125.101. The package which I have built is just for Slackware 14.1 & current. I am pondering an update for the package for Slackware 13.37 & 14.0 but don’t hold your breath. I’ll meet you halfway: I have refreshed the chromium_1337.SlackBuild script in case you want to compile a new one yourself (that script builds the package which I offer for both the older Slackware releases).

Taken from the Chrome releases blog: Chromium 38.0.2125.101 addresses a whopping amount of 159 security fixes, of which these stand out –

  • [$27633.70][416449] Critical CVE-2014-3188: A special thanks to Jüri Aedla for a combination of V8 and IPC bugs that can lead to remote code execution outside of the sandbox.
  • [$3000][398384] High CVE-2014-3189: Out-of-bounds read in PDFium. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$3000][400476] High CVE-2014-3190: Use-after-free in Events. Credit to cloudfuzzer, Chen Zhang (demi6od) of NSFOCUS Security Team.
  • [$3000][402407] High CVE-2014-3191: Use-after-free in Rendering. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$2000][403276] High CVE-2014-3192: Use-after-free in DOM. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$1500][399655] High CVE-2014-3193: Type confusion in Session Management. Credit to miaubiz.
  • [$1500][401115] High CVE-2014-3194: Use-after-free in Web Workers. Credit to Collin Payne.
  • [$4500][403409] Medium CVE-2014-3195: Information Leak in V8. Credit to Jüri Aedla.
  • [$3000][338538] Medium CVE-2014-3196: Permissions bypass in Windows Sandbox. Credit to James Forshaw.
  • [$1500][396544] Medium CVE-2014-3197: Information Leak in XSS Auditor. Credit to Takeshi Terada.
  • [$1500][415307] Medium CVE-2014-3198: Out-of-bounds read in PDFium. Credit to Atte Kettunen of OUSPG.
  • [$500][395411] Low CVE-2014-3199: Release Assert in V8 bindings. Credit to Collin Payne.

This list shows that there is a healthy interest from external researchers to audit the code and contribute to the security of the browser (not only Chrome, but Chromium and Chrome OS profit from these as well). The biggest bonus of over 27 thousand dollars shows that Google is taking security very seriously. They recently announced that they were going to increase the value of these bonuses… et voilà!

Get my Chromium 38.0.2125.101 packages in one of the usual locations:

Let me remind you again, that you can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.
Eric

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