(Open) Widevine support added to the chromium port

27 points by rondahlgren a day ago on lobsters | 4 comments

gnafuthegreat | a day ago

This is the first I've heard of OpenWV, and I love it! I mentioned elsewhere today that I'm trying to move more of my media consumption to systems running open source software, and I hope this will be one more piece of that puzzle (though I don't specifically use OpenBSD).

[OP] rondahlgren | a day ago

I'm excited to try it out. OpenBSD is my daily driver, though I only stream on the living room firestick. If I can get something like Netflix working, it'll be convenient for travel! I will report back either way.

meithecatte | 9 hours ago

OpenWV sounds... weird. From the documentation, I don't really understand where the .wvd file is supposed to come from. The official WideVine CDM from Google doesn't need one, does it?

Is this the sort of thing where "if you know you know wink" is the most they can say for CYA reasons?

tchebb | 6 hours ago

Is this the sort of thing where "if you know you know wink" is the most they can say for CYA reasons?

This is pretty much it. Repositories that include Widevine device identities have received DMCA takedowns before. Since that's not what's novel about OpenWV, I saw no reason to take the risk.

Google's official CDM embeds a device identity, which is heavily obfuscated to discourage extraction. Identities from other devices are fairly easy to come by or extract yourself, though. (Some places call device identities "CDMs", which is not strictly accurate but might help you search for them.)

Google has not shown much inclination thus far to revoke L3 identities that become public, even though they have the technical ability to do so. L3 is the lowest class of identity and often only gets you standard-definition content, but that's also what Google's official CDM library gets you.

L1 identities are a different story: those get you HD/4K content from most providers, but you can only find them inside the trusted execution environments of Widevine-certified devices (Android phones, Smart TVs, etc). They are hard to extract and are typically revoked immediately if they become public. That said, OpenWV is perfectly capable of using an L1 identity if you give it one.