Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: widevine (Page 2 of 5)

No Disney+ on Linux

November 10, 2019 / / 13 Comments

With the new version 4.10.1582.1 of the Widevine DRM plugin package for Chromium that I uploaded today (chromium-widevine-plugin) I really hoped that this would fix the playback error on Linux of the new Disney+ streaming service.

As you may know, Disney is preparing for the official launch of its movie streaming service this week tuesday, 12 November. But we in the Netherlands could enjoy a free test period of two months before the go-live and so I watched several episodes of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series and the Captain Marvel movie, casting from my phone at first but now via an official app on my smart TV. The bad performance of the app and frequent freezes of the video streams have largely been taken care of and fixed during the test period. If you are a fan of the Disney and Fox movie portfolio or enjoy the Marvel and Star Wars movies, then I guess this new platform is for you. It’s still rather limited in scope of course.

Worse in my opinion is the fact that Disney did the Linux community a disservice. The streaming of video does not work – on any browser. The web site works fine, you can browse and explore, but video playback is not possible and an annoying “Error 83” appears instead.

I had subscribed to Disney+ for the free trial straight away on day one. My son was very pleased with that… and when I noticed that their site would not work on my Linux desktop and laptop I assumed this was a beta issue and that it would get fixed. But then the weeks passed and nothing changed.
First online reports of the Linux incompatibility were reported by a dutch Fedora packager. Another dutch tweaker found out that this is caused by a too restricted setting of the DRM for Disney+. Disney uses Widevine as its DRM provider, just like Netflix, Amazon and others. But they cranked up the security level to a value which is not supported on the Linux platform – although it works just fine on Android.

By now the Disney+ streaming service is about to become available world-wide… and Linux support still has not been fixed. My advice is to refuse to pay for a subscription and instead file complaints with Disney that they ignore a large chunk of potential customer base.

Go and write a letter of complaint and make the Linux fans be heard!

Eric

Chromium 68 with updated Widevine plugin

August 4, 2018 / / 11 Comments

chromium_iconLast week, Chromium 68 was introduced to the “Stable Channel” with lots of bugs fixed, many of those being security fixes (42 in total). And a few days ago an update was released, so I decided to build Chromium 68 for Slackware.

NOTE: starting with Chromium 68, the browser will show a “Not secure” warning on all HTTP pages. Google announced this in a blog post published on February 8th on Google’s Chromium and Online Security blogs.

You’ll find 32bit as well as 64bit packages for Chromium 68.0.3440.84 in my package repository. They are available for both Slackware 14.2 and -current. I have also updated the Chromium Widevine plugin to version 1.4.9.1088. The older version refused to work with Chromium 68. Note that the Widevine plugin is available for 32bit just as for the 64bit browser, so even those running older computers (or those of you who are in need of a 32bit OS) can enjoy DRM movie playback.

For newcomers: 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 if you dislike that browser), to watch Netflix.

Also note (to the purists among you): even though support for Widevine CDM plugin has been built into my chromium package, that package is still built from Open Source software only. As long as you do not install the chromium-widevine-plugin package, your system will not be tainted by closed-source code.

Chromium packages: https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium/)
Widevine packages: https://slackware.nl/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium-widevine-plugin/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium-widevine-plugin/)

Chromium 59 – a security update

June 8, 2017 / / 6 Comments

chromium_iconGoogle released chrome/chromium 59.0.3071.86 earlier this week. This was accompanied by a rather big list of security updates.
Taken from the Red Hat Security Advisory: “Multiple flaws were found in the processing of malformed web content. A web page containing malicious content could cause Chromium to crash, execute arbitrary code, or disclose sensitive information when visited by the victim. (CVE-2017-5070, CVE-2017-5071, CVE-2017-5072, CVE-2017-5073, CVE-2017-5074, CVE-2017-5075, CVE-2017-5076, CVE-2017-5077, CVE-2017-5078, CVE-2017-5079, CVE-2017-5080, CVE-2017-5081, CVE-2017-5086, CVE-2017-5082, CVE-2017-5083, CVE-2017-5085)”

Otherwise, Chromium did not receive new functionality that immediately jumps out at me, except that the Chrome Settings page has changed its look and feel to Google’s “Material Design“.

Remember when you want to compile Chromium yourself, you will need ninja and nodejs (fortunately ninja and nodejs are only needed for the compilation, not for actually running the browser).

The packages for chromium, and the chromium widevine CDM plugin, are available for Slackware 14.2 and -current in my repository or one of its mirrors:

Have fun! Eric

Last week’s package harvest and more

March 19, 2017 / / 14 Comments

Last week I made my build server at home churn through a lot of packages, let me summarize what became available recently in my slackbuilds repository:

  • I added ‘NetworkManager-openvpn‘ which is a plugin for NM adding support for OpenVPN connections. I needed this for myself since I recently started using the services of Private Internet Access (PIA). All I needed in addition was the ZIP file with OpenVPN configurations. If you need more instructions about how to setup the PIA VPN let me know and I will wrote some more about that. I also added this plugin to my PLASMA5 Live Edition.
  • I upgraded ‘Handbrake‘ to 1.0.3 which also fixed the libvpx library error on -current.
  • I updated the Flash Player plugins for Mozilla and Chromium browsers to 25.0.0.127 (this is a security update).
  • I updated Chromium and its Widevine plugin to 57.0.2987.98. There is a slightly newer release out already but that will have to wait a bit.
  • I updated LibreOffice to 5.3.1 (packages for -current only but I will build them for 14.2 too).

I did more than that; I also updated the front page of my ‘bear’ server with the information that you can access it over secure HTTP (https), and added a link to my post about the CACert issue with Mozilla and Google browsers. Furthermore I added more detail about the dynamically generated ISOs for Slackware-current (the installation DVD and the Live Edition).

I will spend my next post writing about the new KDE 5_17.03 edition which I uploaded to my ‘ktown’ repository, but let me mention here that I already uploaded a new PLASMA5 variant of the Slackware Live Edition which contains a “work in progress” version of this new Plasma 5 release (work in progress because I decided to add more packages later). I did not mention that in any previous post.
Along with that Plasma 5 Live ISO I also uploaded a variant containing the very fresh MATE 1.18 (thanks to Willy for providing me with the tried & tested packages). So there is enough to play with 🙂
I am actually considering a new spin of the PLASMA5 Live ISO because it allows me to offer the complete KDE-5_17.03 including the Kdenlive non-linear video editor in the Live OS, along with the latest LibreOffice.

Enough for now, check out my follow-up post for the news about my new Plasma 5 ‘ktown’ release.

Have fun! Eric

Chromium 56, LibreOffice 5.2.5

February 1, 2017 / / 21 Comments

libreoffce_logoI had rebuilt the libreoffice-5.2.4 packages for Slackware -current last week, because library updates in Slackware had broken the spreadsheet application ‘localc‘. And voila… not long afterwards the Document Foundation blog announced 5.2.5: “all users are invited to update to LibreOffice 5.2.5 from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions“. Today on the first of february, we can even witness the 5.3 release.

A list of the most significant new features of LibreOffice 5.3 has been published in a separate document (http://tdf.io/lo53features) and you are invited to watch a series of short videos (http://tdf.io/53vids) if you want to get a taste of what’s on the plate. Collaborative editing is the major highlight I guess. A detailed description of these new features is also available as a web page:  http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

I am definitely not building packages right away for 5.3 but I did compile packages for 5.2.5 – albeit only for Slackware -current. I may or may not create these packages for Slackware 14.2 as well and then upgrade the -current package to 5.3. Depends on the other stuff I need to do.

These libreoffice packages are huge in size so please use a mirror for download, and take into account that only the master site and ‘bear’ will have the packages during the first 24 hours.

Note: the LibreOffice browser plugin (NPAPI based) has been removed in LibreOffice 4.4.0:  https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/killing-the-npapi-plugin/

chromium_iconOn another note, Chromium (and Chrome) 56 ‘stable’ was released. It’s nice to test the HTML5 feature set on a site like HTML5test and see that it is at the top of all the browsers up there (517 points, only Chrome 56 for Windows scores better because it supports speech synthesis).

Packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current are now available from my repository. No ETA for Slackware 14.1 packages, and perhaps it is time for people still using Chromium on 14.1 to upgrade to 14.2?

As always, here are some common download sites:

Have fun! Eric

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