I am having problems streaming some TV sites (ITV Hub, BritBox) on Ubuntu 19.10 in Chrome. This is a recent problem that has only recently started, a few weeks ago there was no problem streaming these sites. I regularly update my system and if is therefore very likely that an update is responsible and I only noticed days or weeks later.
I have started to look at the possibility that Widevine DRM is resonsible after James Shade Ubuntu 19.10 some drm content not streaming noted that-.
The problem is the same in Firefox (72.0.1) and Chrome (79.0.3945.130) (with DRM enabled in both). I note that both ITVPlayer and BritBox are getting an error 400 from a call to itvpnp.live.ott.irdeto.com/Widevine/getlicense as the page loads (this returns with a successful 200 response in Windows). This was all working fine in December
I have looked at the folder /opt/google/chrome/WidevineCdm and found this manifest.json file.I notice that there is no Linux entry under "platforms-OS" surely there should be.
{
"manifest_version": 2,
"update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx",
"name": "WidevineCdm",
"description": "Widevine Content Decryption Module",
"version": "4.10.1610.0",
"minimum_chrome_version": "68.0.3430.0",
"x-cdm-module-versions": "4",
"x-cdm-interface-versions": "10",
"x-cdm-host-versions": "10",
"x-cdm-codecs": "vp8,vp09,avc1,av01",
"x-cdm-persistent-license-support": false,
"x-cdm-supported-encryption-schemes": ["cenc","cbcs"],
"icons": {
"16": "imgs/icon-128x128.png",
"128": "imgs/icon-128x128.png"
},
"platforms": [
{
"os": "win",
"arch": "x86",
"sub_package_path": "_platform_specific/win_x86/"
},
{
"os": "win",
"arch": "x64",
"sub_package_path": "_platform_specific/win_x64/"
},
{
"os": "mac",
"arch": "x64",
"sub_package_path": "_platform_specific/mac_x64/"
}
]
}
There is a file called "libwidevinecdm.so under /opt/google/chrome/WidevineCdm/_platform_specific/linux_x64 but I cannot read it.
I would really appreciate any help with this.
X86 = Intel (Wintel) Architecture 32 bit X64 = Intel (Wintel) Architecture 64 bit at a guess Mac64 = Apple Intel architecture 64 bit
Unless you have a Sun server, or something IBM your machine will be one of these architectures (there is no hardware specifically designed for Linux (yet).
I don't think this will impact the DRM.
An experiment might be to try running Chrome as sudo (might pipe clean a rights "writer" somewhere).
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/175967/how-to-run-google-chrome-as-root-in-linux