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Tag: pipelight (Page 2 of 2)

How to make UPC Horizon TV work in Linux

April 17, 2014 / / 3 Comments

pipelight-logo
In an earlier article I have explained how you can use pipelight to run a Windows-based browser plugin seamlessly in your Linux browser. This solution makes use of a modified Wine under the hood. This way, you can for instance display web sites using Microsoft’s SilverLight technology (many dutch schools use a proprietary SilverLight based pupil management system), or use the Windows Flash Player which is much more up to date than Adobe’s plugin for Firefox.

The pipelight plugin loader also supports the Widevine content decryption module, which is used to decrypt a DRM-protected Flash video stream. Widevine is used by UPC‘s service to subscribers to watch television channels on your computer: Horizon TV. I pride myself to be the initiator for getting widevine support added to pipelight because I am a UPC subscriber, but when it actually got added, I found out that I could not make it work with Horizon TV. Bummer!

After a lot of frustration I accidentally stumbled across a thread on the UPC community forum, where cause of the issue was explained and the solution was provided.

The widevine plugin as installed by pipelight is actually too new! In order to make Horizon TV work in a Linux browser, you need an older version of the Widevine DLL. That older version is still available for download, but to be safe I made a copy.

These are the steps you need to perform to make it work: Download the Widevine plugin for Firefox (an XPI file); unzip it in order to extract the DLL file it contains; and then copy the DLL file into the wine-pipelight prefix where Widevine has been installed – this will overwrite the newer (but non-functional) version of the DLL with the older (but working) version.

$ wget https://dl.google.com/widevine/6.0.0.6678/WidevineMediaOptimizer_Win.xpi
$ unzip  WidevineMediaOptimizer_Win.xpi plugins/npwidevinemediaoptimizer.dll
$ cp -p plugins/npwidevinemediaoptimizer.dll \
    ~/.wine-pipelight/drive_c/windows/system32/

Thanks to Theo Band for the instructions! With these three commands, I was able to watch television in my Slackware Firefox browser.

upc_horizon_tv

Hope this helps some of you. Eric

 

Chromium, LibreOffice, Pipelight, Flashplayer updates

February 25, 2014 / / 9 Comments

If you are subscribed to my repository’s RSS feed or if you are using slackpkg+ to keep your Slackware system updated, you will already have noticed and are probably already using the new packages – for the rest of you, here is the harvest of last week.

Chromium

chromium_iconChrome and Chromium were updated to version 33.0, bringing fixes for 28 security issues. The new version number is 33.0.1750.117 to be exact.

The most important fixes (for high-risk vulnerabilities) are:

  • [$2000][334897] High CVE-2013-6652: Issue with relative paths in Windows sandbox named pipe policy. Credit to tyranid.
  • [$1000][331790] High CVE-2013-6653: Use-after-free related to web contents. Credit to Khalil Zhani.
  • [$3000][333176] High CVE-2013-6654: Bad cast in SVG. Credit to TheShow3511.
  • [$3000][293534] High CVE-2013-6655: Use-after-free in layout. Credit to cloudfuzzer.
  • [$500][331725] High CVE-2013-6656: Information leak in XSS auditor. Credit to NeexEmil.

I have packages ready for the new chromium (Slackware 14.0, 14.1 and -current):

In the same locations you will also find updated packages for chromium-pepperflash-plugin and chromium-pdf-plugin. Both these packages contain binaries taken from the official Chrome distribution: respectively an Adobe Flash player and a PDF reader plugin. The Flash player is a security update (new version of the Pepper Flash plugin is 12.0.0.70), just like the other Flash player plugins I will mention further down.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.2.1 packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are ready too. The first minor increment in the 4.2 series took only 3 weeks, solving over 100 bugs which were introduced because of the relatively large amount of new code that was added since the prior 4.1 series. You can read more in the ChangeLog for 4.2.1.

Note that I ship my LibreOffice 4.1 and 4.2 packages with additional “libreoffice-dict-<language>” packages, containing dictionary and spellchecker support! If you are still running Slackware 13.37 there’s LibreOffice 3.6.7 for which I also have packages, and users of Slackware 14.0 are served well with LibreOffice 4.1.4 (I will compile packages for 4.1.5 shortly).

Package locations:

Pipelight

pipelight-logo The new pipelight release brings updates and fixes. More Windows browser plugins are supported, but being able to view Netflix will still be the major benefit for many of its users. Note that the update will also bring you the newest Flash Player version (fixing several security issues as already pointed out when I wrote about Chrome’s PepperFlash update). Together with the newest pipelight, I also created new packages for its wine-pipelight dependency, bringing the version of Wine to 1.7.13.

Let me remind you that in my original post about pipelight, you will find full installation and configuration instructions, as well as a troubleshooting section.

Package location:

 

Linux Flash Player

Of course there is the normal¨ Flash Player plugin for Linux as well – it received an update from Adobe just like its Chrome and Windows pendants. That same Adobe security bulletin mentions that the new version of the Linux browser plugin is 11.2.202.341. Package location:

Have fun! Eric

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