Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: netflix (Page 2 of 3)

Chromium: the answer to life, the universe and everything

April 16, 2015 / / 10 Comments

Chromium and Widevine:

chromium_iconGeeks and Sci-Fi fans, as well as otherwise properly educated people, will recognize the blog title for what it is.

Chrome 42 is released. Big jump: a major version change. Mostly changes under the hood again it seems. The Chrome binaries for this version contain a new version of the PepperFlash plugin, which I have extracted for use with the chromium browser – see my earlier blog. The packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are available for download so that you can enjoy the latest Chromium browser (and its optional Widevine plugin) in your trustworthy Slackware environment.

In the  Chrome Releases blog you can read the announcement for Chrome/Chromium 42 to the Stable Channel (full version is 42.0.2311.90).

The new packages for my chromium and chromium-widevine-plugin packages both have version 42.0.2311.90 – indicating that they should be used together. The Widevine plugin reports itself as version “1.4.7.796” in chrome://plugins – same version as in my chromium-dev 43 package.

You don’t have to install the Widevine plugin. Chromium without Widevine plugin is a pure and open source browser, even the Widevine “adapter module” inside the Chromium package is open source. The Widevine library itself is a closed-source Content Decryption Module (CDM) which therefore is not part of the Chromium package but separately packaged (after extracting it from Google’s binary download of the Chrome browser with the same version number). You would typically want to install the plugin if you have a Netflix subscription and want to watch your movies in a Chromium browser.

Download locations:

Have fun! Next on the blog: new packages for VLC, the VideoLAN media player!

Eric

Chromium 41

March 6, 2015 / / 19 Comments

Chromium and Widevine:

chromium_iconI prepared packages for you (Slackware 14.1 and -current) for the latest Chromium browser and its optional Widevine plugin. In the  Chrome Releases blog you can read the announcement for Chrome/Chromium 41 to the Stable Channel (full version is 41.0.2272.76).

Chromium 41 is a major version upgrade with attention to security and performance. I could not find new functionality that needs mentioning though.

The new packages for my chromium and chromium-widevine-plugin packages both have version 41.0.2272.76 – indicating that they should be used together. The Widevine plugin reports itself as version “1.4.7.771” in chrome://plugins .

You don’t have to install the Widevine plugin. Chromium without Widevine plugin is a pure and open source browser, even the Widevine “adapter module” inside the Chromium package is open source. The Widevine library itself is a closed-source Content Decryption Module (CDM) which therefore is not part of the Chromium package but separately packaged (after extracting it from Google’s binary download of the Chrome browser with the same version number).

Download locations:

Note for the curious: Widevine is a Content Decryption Module (CDM) used by Netflix to stream video to your computer in a Chromium browser window. With my chromium and chromium-widevine-plugin packages you no longer need Chrome, or Firefox with Pipelight, to watch Netflix.

Have fun with it! For me, it is bed time after a long working week, and time to bake some good sourdough breads during the weekend. After the weekend I hope to take a look at the new KDE Applications 14.12.3 tarballs and TigerVNC. Considering the promise of sun and high temperatures during the weekend, I would rather spend time walking outside with my wife than spend time alone behind this computer 🙂

Eric

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

(Wine-) Pipelight update – careful upgrade

December 23, 2014 / / 7 Comments

pipelight-logo After a long time of silence (but ongoing development as shown in their git repository) the Pipelight developers released a new stable pipelight a few weeks ago. I created Slackware packages for this (Slackware 14.0 and newer) but before you upgrade, please read the words of caution at the end of this post, they will save you some frustration.

The new pipelight is a bugfix release: after Google deprecated NPAPI plugins, the focus for Pipelight team has been better support for Firefox. As stated in the release notes, most of the remaining bugs should now be in Wine, not in pipelight. That has also lead to more focus on what used to be called “wine-compholio”. the team’s patch-set for wine that implements the Windows browser plugin support. The name “wine-compholio” has changed to “Wine Staging” which is now even used as the default wine version on Fedora. I am not willing to go that far, so there is still a separate wine-pipelight package that you have to install on Slackware in order to use my pipelight package.

Remember that you can always get the latest Windows plugin releases (an important feature in case of security fixes) without having to wait for me creating a new package. Just run the command “pipelight-plugin –update” as root. After doing that, the next time your browser loads the pipelight plugin, it will automatically download the newest version of your installed Windows plugin(s).

I know that some people are grumbling whenever someone develops a program for Linux that enables the use of Windows software (emulated or otherwise), such as wine or pipelight. The fact is, if you want to watch Netflix on your Slackware computer, and you do not want to install Google Chrome, then Mozilla Firefox combined with pipelight and MS SilverLight is still the only way to achieve this. Chromium does not support NPAPI either and the Widevine CDM can not be made to work as it does in Chrome. Also, software using Silverlight is still widespread in school systems. I will welcome the future implementation of EME in Firefox that will allow separate download and use of Content Decryption Modules (CDM) like Widevine which is used by Chrome for streaming Netflix. Then, Google Chrome nor pipelight/silverlight will be necessary any longer. Accepting that DRM is here to stay and can still be made compatible to Open Source and Free Choice is the start and I am glad that Mozilla thought hard and long about the apparent clash and came up with a sane solution.

Anyway, enough of the ranting.

In my original post about pipelight, you will find full installation and configuration instructions, as well as a troubleshooting section. That blog article is also referred to on the pipelight.net support page. Let me remind you that you need to go multilib if you want to use pipelight on 64-bit Slackware.

Package location (uploads expected later today, I thought it was more important to have this blog page up first):

A note of caution when upgrading to my pipelight-0.2.8 package:

This only applies to 64-bit Slackware!!!

I have made one important change to the file locations of the 64-bit pipelight package. The file “libpipelight.so” is a 64-bit shared library, but the previous 64-bit pipelight packages would install this file into “/usr/lib/pipelight/libpipelight.so”. That is not the correct location for 64-bit libraries, so the new package installs this file as “/usr/lib64/pipelight/libpipelight.so”.

This has the side effect that your pipelight stops working. The error message(if you start firefox in a terminal) will be something like “pluginInitOkay(): incompatible version of pluginloader.exe“. Don’t worry, you can remedy this.

These are the steps you have to take in order to fix this (it’s a one-time action):

As root user: remove all old copies of the library created by earlier pipelight versions:

# rm -r /usr/lib/pipelight

As your own user account, list all plugins you have currently enabled (copy that command’s output because you have to re-enable them in a later step):

$ pipelight-plugin --list-enabled

That command basically checks your “~/.mozilla/plugins/” directory for symlinks named “libpipelight*.so”. If you look inside that directory, you will notice that all these symlinks are pointing to the no longer existing location “/usr/lib/pipelight”. So, you first remove those symlinks:

$ pipelight-plugin --disable-all

And re-create them properly (still as your own user account):

$ pipelight-plugin --enable <your previously enabled plugin(s)>

That’s all. Have fun! Eric

 

New pipelight release, accompanied by wine-pipelight. And what about chromium?

June 5, 2014 / / 5 Comments

You are of course subscribed to my repository’s RSS feed and/or you are using slackpkg+ . Then you certainly noticed the update of Chromium to the new major version 35 two weeks ago. I really should have written about this update earlier, because Chromium 35 brings some unfortunate side effects to the table.

Chromium

chromium_iconChrome and Chromium were updated to version 35.0.1916.114, with “fixes for 23 security issues“. The most important fixes (for high-risk vulnerabilities) are:

  • [$3000][356653] High CVE-2014-1743: Use-after-free in styles. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$3000][359454] High CVE-2014-1744: Integer overflow in audio. Credit to Aaron Staple.
  • [$1000][346192] High CVE-2014-1745: Use-after-free in SVG. Credit to Atte Kettunen of OUSPG.
  • [$1000][364065] Medium CVE-2014-1746: Out-of-bounds read in media filters. Credit to Holger Fuhrmannek.
  • [$1000][330663] Medium CVE-2014-1747: UXSS with local MHTML file. Credit to packagesu.
  • [$500][331168] Medium CVE-2014-1748: UI spoofing with scrollbar. Credit to Jordan Milne.

I also updated the accompanying package for chromium-pepperflash-plugin (extracted from the official Chrome binaries) to 13.0.0.214. This is a security update.

The version 35 of Chromium has a major side effect that many people are not going to like. The support for browser plugins that use Mozilla’s NPAPI protocol to communicate with the browser has been removed and only Google’s own PPAPI protocol is supported as of now (MS Windows users still have a bit of time before the same happens to their Chrome browser – removal of NPAPI support in Windows is scheduled for the end of 2014). This step was of course announced long time ago and many reminders were posted, but if you need Java support in your browser, or want to watch Netflix using pipelight, then you are out of luck. PPAPI versions for these browser plugins do not exist and in the case of pipelight, are very hard to create.

You’re forced to switch (back) to Firefox in these cases.

Pipelight

pipelight-logo Speaking of Pipelight… there was a new pipelight release a couple of days back, and this is accompanied by a new web site: pipelight.net. These guys really like writing their own CMS-es! The source code to the new CMS is available on github by the way. With the new release of pipelight you’ll get more supported browser plugins, security updates for all relevant plugins such as Flash, and many bug fixes. Also, for people with an AMD graphics card the good news is that hardware acceleration is now supported and enabled by default.Also note that I have enabled support for WoW64 (meaning that apart from the regular 32-bit applications, 64-bit Windows plugins are also supported on Slackware 64-bit)

Luckily this all still works on Slackware-current’s kernel – there were fears that 32-bit Wine applications would stop working on the 3.14.4 and newer kernels.

Remember that you can always get the latest Windows plugin releases (an important feature in case of security fixes) without having to wait for me creating a new package. Just run the command “pipelight-plugin –update” as root. After doing that, the next time your browser loads the pipelight plugin, it will automatically download the newest version of your installed Windows plugin(s).

Together with this pipelight release, the pipelight developers released their latest “wine-compholio patches“, a set of patches for the official Wine sources which are needed for proper Windows plugin support in your Linux browser. Naturally I created new wine-pipelight packages for you, based on Wine 1.7.19.

In my original post about pipelight, you will find full installation and configuration instructions, as well as a troubleshooting section. That blog article is also referred to on the pipelight.net support page.

Package location:

 

Have fun! Eric

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