Sorry to hear that. Hopefully something comes out of this which can improve the process for all of us. :(

Had the same issue with an Electron app of mine, published on the AppStore with 10k users or so.It&#x27;s been more than a year that I&#x27;m in contact with Google&#x2F;Widevine, waiting for my license.This is a nightmare. It&#x27;s such an obvious gatekeeping mechanism.

Yes - reading the post it appears OP&#x27;s specific value proposition is keeping DRM&#x27;d videos in sync. This reminds me of watching Dawson&#x27;s Creek with my girlfriend in 8th grade - we&#x27;d call eachother on the phone and watch the show at the same time. Anyway this would be the browser version of that, from what I understand.

You&#x27;re right in general, but the OP&#x27;s browser seems fairly useless without it

Wait really? With what videos does YouTube depend on Widevine DRM?

Youtube has DRM and has nothing to do with WebM. It&#x27;s just that not all the content is DRM-ed.

&gt; For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source project.It can too be completed, you&#x27;re just not gonna have DRM&#x27;d content. I have a browser that has the same problem, and I just leave pages that can&#x27;t do video playback (which doesn&#x27;t include YouTube because they use WebM). There&#x27;s still value in a non-DRM&#x27;d browser for most of the web, and hey, if enough of us use one maybe sites will start being more liberal in the licensing of their video (but let&#x27;s be honest, probably not).

By getting media from &quot;alternative&quot; DRM free sources.

Your only options are to videos from a DRM free source or remove the DRM. The later is prohibited in most jurisdictions. Just hope your vision and hearing stay unimpaired because DRM locks out all accessibility software.

The linux community took a little bit but was able to get the DRM stuff working through wine (I think it was firefox+silvervine or something)and I think they now have a native solution. I doubt there&#x27;s any real reason you couldn&#x27;t get it working, it&#x27;s just the FreeBSD community is a lot smaller and you&#x27;ll have to convince somebody to work on it unless you have the know-how to yourself.

Yes. It&#x27;s getting somewhat out of date though (e.g. current versions of Steam can&#x27;t connect to the network)

Doesn&#x27;t FreeBSD provide Linux kernel ABI compatibility?

This is the only reason you can&#x27;t watch Netflix on FreeBSD using chromium or Firefox, too.

&gt; Firefox doesn&#x27;t support this.Firefox does support either exactly this or something compatible.

&gt; Firefox doesn&#x27;t support this.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;enable-drm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;enable-drm</a>&quot;Firefox for desktop supports the Google Widevine CDM for playing DRM-controlled content. Firefox downloads and enables the Google Widevine CDM by default to give users a smooth experience on sites that require DRM.&quot;

So google won&#x27;t let you use there DRM. Firefox doesn&#x27;t support this.Don&#x27;t allow DRM sources hulu&#x2F;netflix otherwise make a deal with each company. Your problem is with the video providers not a third party who has a solution you want to use.

The Widevine CDM is publicly available but you are not allowed to redistribute it. Firefox seems to have no problem downloading it at runtime. In worst case the user could manually download it.

Widevine is a DRM scheme.  You need a license and information from Google to decode it without breaking the DRM.

So how do open source browsers like Chromium and Firefox do this? Surely if they have access to the blackbox, then anyone does? And if they don&#x27;t, it means you can&#x27;t watch Netflix on some major browsers.

What video content are we talking about here? HTML5 video?

Yes, you need Google&#x27;s approval because now all major browsers have a black-box&#x2F;binary blob which downloads other funky binary stuff so that it can decrypt video content. As you might figure out Google&#x2F;Wildevine org gives the blackbox only to approved developers&#x2F;devices&#x2F;applications.Bonus DRM: If your license is not &quot;the most certified&quot; your browser&#x2F;player will play only shitty&#x2F;low quality versions of the video. There are other goodies of course like not being able to play the content offline.

It is in the article:&gt;As far as I’m aware, Widevine is the only available DRM for a Chromium-based browser, especially so for Electron.

Sorry, for those of us not privy to how Widevine works, what&#x27;s the problem exactly? What do you need Google&#x27;s approval for and why?

A little bit of A and all of B&#x2F;C&#x2F;D. Not all of HDMI is encrypted, but for the part that is the protocol is known, but you also need the keys which are meant to be stored in secure hardware and difficult to extract.Also, old keys are frequently phased out, with new media requiring newer keys for playback.

Most of the above, with a couple caveats.For HDMI, specifically:A is true, as HDMI requires a pretty ugly IP core on an fpga or an asic to process or produce the phy.B is also true, as to sell a device with an HDMI port you have to join the group and pay fees. If you&#x27;re just hacking stuff together for personal use I think you&#x27;re A-okay here.C is true ONLY in the case of HDCP protected content, as that handshake does not occur for unprotected content or HDMI 1.0Also, side note, VGA uses analog R&#x2F;G&#x2F;B channels so if you want to pipe signals into the program you&#x27;d need an ADC to get useful values from it, and a pretty fast one depending on your resolution.

Outputting an image via HDMI using an FPGA is relatively straightforward, almost as easy as VGA. I don&#x27;t know about HDCP but expect it to be next to impossible.Inputting any pulse-based high-frequency signal is more difficult, be it VGA or Ethernet or HDMI.

Mind helping me understand this a bit better?The link mentions that to produce a HDCP-compatible device (eg one that has an HDMI port) it needs to be licensed, pay an annual fee, and make promises to frustrate DRM-mitigation efforts.If I wanted to make my own monitor with a VGA input (or, more practically, pipe the signals coming from VGA into a program that does something with the feed) I would just have to find a suitable adapter and receive the serial data.Does this mean that doing so with HDMI (either the real-world DIY monitor, or the in-software feed-ingestion program) would be:A) Difficult&#x2F;time-consuming to write due to a lack of open drivers
B) Run afoul of IP laws pertaining to the HDMI standard and get me sued
C) Prevented by the cryptographic handshake that happens between an approved display and the output drivers
D) All of the above?

HDCP is of course completely broken, and has been ever since the master key was leaked years ago. You can find all sorts of &quot;video stabilisers&quot; and such sold online, which will strip HDCP completely (they do not obviously advertise this ability, so read between the lines...)(I wonder if the same people who are up in arms about China&#x27;s lax IP laws and massive product counterfeiting realise that it&#x27;s the same country, the same culture, the same mentality which allows them to easily produce these devices that actually fight for your freedom to consume content.)

DRM often results in a whitelist of media clients, killing standards in favor of a centralized authority. HDCP does the same for video feeds (HDMI, etc.). DRM-protected boxes can only output to DRM-protected displays, giving a central authority the ability to effectively deny new client devices from being made: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;High-bandwidth_Digital_Conte...</a>

Essentially. The money gated behind a closed DRM solution is so large that the w3c ran the risk of becoming an irrelevant standards body for this space if they didn&#x27;t comply with what their members wanted to do.It&#x27;s sub-optimal, but I don&#x27;t think an optimal solution actually existed. A standards board divorced from reality is no better than no standard at all.

&gt; No, if the Director had overridden the majority of the membership, the browser vendors would&#x27;ve shipped something anywayThat&#x27;s fine. It&#x27;s better that the burden for maintaining non-standard plugins be put on the sites and browsers that choose to do that, rather than be placed on everyone else.

No, if the Director had overridden the majority of the membership, the browser vendors would&#x27;ve shipped something anyway, and the YouTubes and Netflixes of the world would be using it anyway.

The W3C membership nowhere near unanimously approved the advancement of the EME specification to Recommendation; that much has been said publicly by various people over the course of the past few years.The majority of the membership was in favour, definitely, but it wasn&#x27;t unanimous. Some members I think it&#x27;s predictable how they voted (MPAA may have voted in favour, EFF may have voted against); others less so.

The W3C exists partly to take the blame off of its members for the decisions that they agree to unanimously.  Blame the W3C members for their decision to screw the user.

How is that &quot;threat&quot; a problem? That sounds like an Old Microsoft objection to cross-platform code, but the web is already cross-platform code, so that doesn&#x27;t make any sense.And if the browser vendors really didn&#x27;t like it for unknown reasons then they could have just stopped supporting Java in the browser, as has largely already happened for various other reasons.This is one of those &quot;we all must hang together or we shall all hang separately&quot; situations, and they apparently decided they&#x27;d prefer to hang separately.

It was never gonna happen; as soon as Intel introduced SGX, any DRM-producing company that wasn’t taking advantage of it would be seen as failing their shareholders. Even if Flash had died on schedule without browsers offering a native browser-DOM DRMed-content API, DRMed-content producers would just have jumped to another tech the DRM vendors sold them.My guess is that, if browser vendors wouldn’t have played ball, the DRM vendors would have worked with one of the JRE vendors to optimize the Java applet runtime, and contributed to performance improvements on the browser side for all the open browsers, such that “Java applet” would no longer be a scary heavy-weight thing nobody wants their browser to launch. That would be (one of) the implicit threats hanging over browser vendors: if you don’t cooperate, we’ll take your control over innovation on the web away by refocusing it on an improved Java experience.

No, blame the movie studios, record labels etc. They&#x27;re the one which require asinine DRM support for web browsers. Google&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;Adobe want to support media content, but to do so requires towing the line with the media companies otherwise they refuse to license the content (at least in HD+).Having worked with various DRM teams I know that they have to treat their code as if its the most secret code in the world, if they don&#x27;t the media companies can swoop in and ban them and then no Netflix for your users. This is why Widevine code isn&#x27;t open source (other than the glue EME code) and is almost certainly the reason for the refusal to work with a small open-source form of Chromium. If for example the project was used to &quot;steal&quot; content the media companies would be mad at Widevine, with lasting repercussions for all Chrome users.It&#x27;s worth noting that typically all DRM teams work as if the hosting environment is an adversary. For example Widevine don&#x27;t trust anything Chrome says as someone could recompile it and lie about the security. The only times this is relaxed is where the platform is deemed secure, such as CrOS or iOS.

&quot;when Netflix came begging for a solution to their DRM conundrum&quot;Does Netflix DRM even &quot;work&quot;? I&#x27;ve never personally seriously looked around for how to break it, but I note there are still plenty of people who seem to manage to review Netflix-based shows on YouTube with video clips of sufficient quality [1], and at least some of the reviewers in question I am fairly confident aren&#x27;t getting any sort of privileged backdoor access or anything.Is it &quot;anyone can crack with a smidge of effort&quot; or &quot;it&#x27;s really hard but it spreads once cracked&quot;? I&#x27;m not asking for a lot of details of the crack per se, just general details of how successful it can be said to be in practice.[1] I&#x27;m not claiming they aren&#x27;t necessarily re-re-encoded by the time they get to me, but if they are, I can&#x27;t tell for sure, so I&#x27;m going with &quot;sufficient quality&quot; as a description.

I have no sympathy for Netflix; not too long ago, Linux users had to jump a series of hurdles just to be able to play Netflix videos (including installing 32-bit Mono and Silverlight (yuck) and faking the User Agent string). As an end-user I&#x27;m happier now that it just works; as a FOSS fan, I blame the &quot;content-owners&quot; onerous demands for DRM.

I blame the OSS community that rolled out the red carpet for DRM. They are the only ones who really had a choice to make. I frankly don&#x27;t blame the corporations pushing this, because they have been trying the whole time.And they did it for the worst reasons. Vanity and pride. The corporations pushing DRM are merely motivated by greed.But the players in the OSS community that opened the door for DRM were TERRIFIED of being labeled as &quot;obsolete&quot; or losing pretend &quot;market share&quot;. They refused to take a stand against DRM, if it meant losing any users. Just look at the discussion thread where Mozilla decided to support DRM.The arguments in favor of DRM by the OSS community are always the same:
 - We need to support terrible DRM because it is popular (and being numerically popular is super important).
 - We need to compromise against our users because if we don&#x27;t then we won&#x27;t have any leverage (which we are conceding we don&#x27;t have anyway)
- &quot;marketshare&quot;
- &quot;integrated branding&quot;(?)None of this makes sense, because Google, Apple, and Microsoft have completely different goals with building for-profit forms.People who speak in slimey business sales marketing speak are making decisions about the direction of OSS software. And these people are obsessed with cargo-culting the big commercial platforms.

Blame Google and Microsoft. They were the people who created the specification, and pushed for it, when Netflix came begging for a solution to their DRM conundrum. Even if the W3C hadn&#x27;t approved it, that&#x27;s two of the big four browser vendors who are committing to implementing it anyways, which is enough to guarantee a de facto standard anyways.

I don&#x27;t suppose you remember, but they did their key management in native code plugins 10-15 years ago. Silverlight and Flash both had DRM capability, IIRC. I&#x27;ve worked with that and it was no joy at all.Without W3C DRM they would have kept those plugins alive instead of deprecating them. I see no reason why they&#x27;d have migrated to webasm, webasm wouldn&#x27;t provide the know-thy-customer aspect the DRM people want.

&gt; The blame for this sits squarely on the w3c for their efforts in trying to replace flash by letting the content companies dictate standards for encrypted playback.It really isn&#x27;t. The W3C at the very least permits a solution whereby content companies liberally distribute binary blobs for every platform under the sun. Hell, it even permits an open source solution that e.g. speaks directly to the DRM hardware in graphics chips (don&#x27;t know if that would be technically feasible, don&#x27;t shoot me).It doesn&#x27;t have to be this way.In this context it&#x27;s really specifically Google being assholes about this. They can choose to not be assholes about this. The fact that the W3C allows them to be assholes about this doesn&#x27;t change the fact that Google is choosing to be this way about it.

How would have that worked? If you do not sign every single file per user, there is no real way to get something secure if you do not controle the whole processing pipeline.

The problem is that pretty much the only way to satisfy those obligations is to turn the internet into a huge walled garden (as is currently happening). So we&#x27;ll either have to accept the consequences of that, decide that some of the rightsholders&#x27; claims described above are not in the public interest or find some kind of middle ground.

You make good points but:&gt;And if you don&#x27;t want to make copying too easy because you think that it will get you more money, that&#x27;s your right.They seem to think that but is there any truth to it? I do pirate some series&#x2F;movies from time to time (mostly out of convenience) and you can get high quality rips of pretty much anything mere hours after it&#x27;s available on streaming sites anyway.So what is this DRM supposed to achieve? Prevent the average non-technical user from saving the stream? I mean I&#x27;m sure they wouldn&#x27;t even know where to start, there&#x27;s no &quot;Save As&quot; button on Netflix for instance. Simple client-side limitations would do the trick for 99.9% of the population. On the other hand the few technically-savvy stream rippers seem to have no issue bypassing these protections.DRM works better for interactive content like games because it&#x27;s not just about ripping the output.How many decades do we have to suffer through this broken scheme and this technical debt until the right owners realize that they&#x27;re wasting their time and their resources to push a system that only serves to make it harder for legit clients to consume their contents?When iTunes got rid of DRM on music files I thought it would be the tipping point where right owners would realize that this scheme was ineffective and counter-productive, but apparently it&#x27;s still an industry standard for some reason. Have legit users on unsupported systems stream low-res video while the pirates can watch it in 4k for free. Ridiculous.

If it is your intellectual property, you get to decide how it is used.Another poster here made an interesting point, that this wasn&#x27;t true until the 90s. Deciding &quot;how it is used&quot; is different from (and broader than) deciding &quot;who gets to distribute it&quot;.

The W3C, Google, Apple and MS and the TV manufacturers could have said &quot;OK then, keep your content to yourself, let&#x27;s see how your business does without us providing ways to deliver your crippled content to the eyes and ears of your customers.&quot;But of course they didn&#x27;t say that, because most of them got some direct or indirect interest in DRM, enough so that the few remaining players did have no choice than to hop on board, too.

The W3C isn&#x27;t to blame. No one is to blame, really.We have DRM, we hate it but it&#x27;s there, and it serves a purpose. If it is your intellectual property, you get to decide how it is used. And if you don&#x27;t want to make copying too easy because you think that it will get you more money, that&#x27;s your right.The goal of the W3C is not to make to make a political statement about the rightness or wrongness of DRM. They are here to create standards that respond to use cases. And unfortunately, copyrighted content diffusion is one use case, and content owners want DRM.And if you read the standard they came up with, it is not that bad. They managed to isolate the &quot;evil DRM&quot; part well enough without completely destroying its effectiveness. They also didn&#x27;t require any proprietary component, though services can require them (that&#x27;s what happened in the article).Using WebAssembly (which is essentially optimized JS) for DRM is a terrible idea IMHO. DRM, to be effective, usually requires access to protected system components. It means that to make an effective enough DRM to be accepted by content providers (which is the entire point of the standard), we would need to give WebAssembly way to much power.

Tim Berners-Lee&#x27;s Google-funded $1M Turing award sure smelled like a payoff to me.  If it wasn&#x27;t, the timing sure was convenient.

The blame for this sits squarely on the w3c for their efforts in trying to replace flash by letting the content companies dictate standards for encrypted playback.If they had held fast, we could have forced the companies to do their key management in something like WebAssembly and avoided this gatekeeping mess.

Send this to the @EU_Commission - they might look into it.

Yep. We optimized having Netflix over having another browser out there with a new feature-set.For basically all the users, this works great; demand for a new browser is low, for streaming media pretty high.

Firefox uses Google&#x27;s Widevine for DRM content: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;enable-drm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;enable-drm</a>&quot;Firefox downloads and enables the Google Widevine CDM by default to give users a smooth experience on sites that require DRM.&quot;

It&#x27;s never too late. Thanks for taking action.

It&#x27;s not the web that needs to be open (or &quot;more&quot; open I guess). It&#x27;s the legal teams at media companies that need to be educated on how FOSS works, what it can&#x2F;can&#x27;t do to&#x2F;for your products, and the legal implications of it in your dependency graph and your vendors&#x27;.If you walked into some of these offices and suggested making things more open, they would laugh in your face. They equate free and open software with making their IP free as in beer, and since they lost billions in revenue when the P2P sharing sites first popped up they have no interest in working to make anything easier for the smaller guys.

Truth hurts. Is it too late to open up the web? I&#x27;ve already switched to Firefox.

Plenty of people here were cheering on EME DRM

&gt; Google got the authority from everyone here who accepted chrome and IE DRM by default, to the point that even Firefox was forced to give in, so you all could be sedated by Netflix and other DRMed content.Do you really, REALLY think that the very small number of people who are ever AWARE of this issue were enough to make a dent in it? So we could be sedated by Netflix? This attitude is intolerable and more harmful to the community of people who want a free web as using Chrome and watching Netflix is.

I never switched from Firefox in 10+ years and somehow, this still affects me. Blaming users isn&#x27;t the solution. This is an issue of enforcing standards (in whichever way), you can&#x27;t expect the entirety of internet users to suddenly become experts on DRM.

&gt; Having to fall back to a flash player was never ideal.Flash had&#x2F;has to die!

I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s an elephant.I work in this space and I think the EME path has been a fairly elegant solution for a lot of what was preventing us from being able to use HTML5 video, including DRM but also live streaming and its ilk with HLS&#x2F;Dash and being able to quickly implement new codecs and transports. Having to fall back to a flash player was never ideal.If you want to make an argument that DRM is bad, or, maybe more relevant, ineffective I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d argue with you. However I think the solution we have in place has made the video ecosystem in the browser better and did it quickly.The issue here is about commercial use of a product and while we can blame Google as the owners of Widevine this really doesn&#x27;t have anything to do with Chrome - outside of the fact that the author was able to quickly create his own browser based on open source components upon which Chrome was based.

The elephant is that so many bright people from the &quot;best&quot; schools continue to work for such an evil company.

let&#x27;s address the elephant in the room.Google got the authority from everyone here who accepted chrome and IE DRM by default, to the point that even Firefox was forced to give in, so you all could be sedated by Netflix and other DRMed content.

&gt;Do you choose to either prosecute a burgler or put a lock on your door but not both?Physical property and intellectual property are not the same, so this analogy does not hold.Copyright is fundamentally a balancing act between these two opposing interests:<pre><code> - the right of a creator to make money of their creation for a limited time

 - the right of the public &quot;to promote the progress of science and useful arts&quot;
</code></pre>
There is no such duty for a physical property owner to allow others to access, view, or build upon his property.If you choose to use technological means to deny society the second interest above you should not also be allowed to claim the protection of the first interest above.

What kind of argument is that? Do you choose to either prosecute a burgler or put a lock on your door but not both?That said, the media industry as a whole has pushed more than what&#x27;s necessary to protect its content (eg. DMCA, extending the copyright window) and a more fruitful course of action is to get Congress to change those laws.

This is why I break DRM when I can, treating its presence as advisory at best.From a balancing test standpoint, if you want a technological solution to people copying your work then I think you should not be allowed to claim copyright protection of your work. Pick a legal or technical solution to unauthorized copying, not both.

I wanted to be sure that there were multiple instance of this in your posting history (there are) before I commented, but you regularly use &quot;there&quot; in place of possessive &quot;their&quot;.I would want someone to correct me on a fundamental grammar mistake in Spanish, so I felt it would be useful to correct you here.

The world doesn&#x27;t rotate around netflix and co. You do not need to consume them if you don&#x27;t want to. There is also no right from yourside to how you wish you like to consume it.I would prefer to have NO DRM of course don&#x27;t get me wrong. But still in this case, it is not your decision and apparently most people really don&#x27;t care for that at all. They wanna see netflix in there browser. Thats why google and co did it. Thats why no one cares that there might be a electorn based browser somewhere which is unable to implement its core feature of sync viewing.And while i like the idea, just because is just not good enough. Noone will cancel there netflix subscription over this.

I think this is an incomplete picture. Guessing at their motivations, DRM also serves to reduce opportunities for casual copyright violation when you have to jump through illegal (which is part of the scheme) hoops to circumvent it.

exactly, but my point is that most of the players don&#x27;t have a good product, so why would they force people to use it?  In the last few months I&#x27;ve used Prime Video, Crackle, FXNOW, WWE Network, NJPWWorld, and HonorClub.     All of them are awwwwful, and it would only benefit them if they could come up with an api standard for content, and let other vendors take care of the front end.

The entire idea behind DRM is to gain control over the user experience of legitimate users. Pirates will always break whatever DRM scheme you use. Wasting energy on them will always be futile. Controlling the user experience? That&#x27;s where you can make a lot of money by pushing out competitors.

Right, thats the whole thing that sucks about DRM and these video providers in general. Not only do they want to protect their content from unauthorized viewers, they want to control how it is consumed. Which to me is especially outrageous because netflix and youtube are the only two with a good user experience. (I used to count Hulu, but at some point they really fell off)I would think that Amazon would lead the charge for an open standard for distributing video which handles DRM, subscription, pay per view, etc. and then all the non-Netflixes would publish to that standard, and let player applications thrive. Even when using a Roku it feels like each app is completely different. And most of them suck. Imagine if in 1985 Prism, HBO, and Showtime all manufactured their own TVs and required you to use them, but they all had wildly different layouts and remotes.The idea of syncing up two video streams is awesome, I can see people enjoying that, and it would encourage people to pay for whatever services their friends have. Though it does sound a bit similar to rabb.it

I think Kodi has made amazing progress. I&#x27;ve not had issues getting it installed on different devices since the 15.x days. Currently run it on 4 different dedicated devices in my apartment as well as some mobile and media devices.&gt; The docs on how to do simple things seem to be nonexistant because they don&#x27;t want to be sued and shutdown entirely.What docs are you looking for? They have a very extensive wiki as well as an active community on their own forum.

Kodi&#x27;s been around for like 15 years now so if you&#x27;re hoping for it to become something else, I would stop holding your breath. I&#x27;m not thrilled that it&#x27;s non-free nor about some of the changes they&#x27;re making, but I&#x27;ve found Plex to be pretty pleasant to set up.

As a long time Kodi user, I&#x27;ll just say that the combination of Kodi on my PC hooked up to a big screen and the Yatse app on my phone was a total game changer.  A WiFi remote control on the device I basically already had in my hands anyway changed the way I interact with media at home.

I hope Kodi makes some decent progress. I installed it a few weeks back and it is a rough experience. The docs on how to do simple things seem to be nonexistant because they don&#x27;t want to be sued and shutdown entirely.

There are a few solutions to this.And... they are using chromium. Can I be sympathetic to Google because they have to pay people money to support this?

On a related note here&#x27;s an arch linux package that rips Widewvine out of chrome and adds it to chromium - download the source files by clicking the &quot;Download snapshot&quot; button on the right, or just view the main script by clicking &quot;View PKGBUILD&quot; also on the right.Edit: Forgot link <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;chromium-widevine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;chromium-widevine&#x2F;</a>

Interesting... I mostly use Kodi for NAS media and run it under NVidia Shield TV because running it on an HTPC was so limiting of an experience for Netflix, etc.  Almost ironically also have a Fire stick, because Hulu won&#x27;t port the updated interface (for live tv) to the Android TV version despite working on Fire devices.

&gt; I can&#x27;t imagine Google gave the OK to Kodi to use widevine so maybe you can see what they did?Kodi uses the OS native implementation of the DRM, or Chromium with Widevine.

I don&#x27;t know if this will be helpful to you but an open source media player, Kodi, recently added support for Netflix in the latest version of the app (by implementing a DRM engine for people to use).This requires the use of the widevine library which then downloads things behind the scenes upon use (I believe). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.kodi.tv&#x2F;showthread.php?tid=329767" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.kodi.tv&#x2F;showthread.php?tid=329767</a>I can&#x27;t imagine Google gave the OK to Kodi to use widevine so maybe you can see what they did?

I feel like the op is missing technique and blaming Google with inflammatory title and preying on people&#x27;s hated of DRM. If this was a more mundane technical problem it wouldn&#x27;t be at the top of HN and it would be obvious that they just don&#x27;t have the chops.

In an absolute sense this is true, but in all practical senses the title holds.

Why can&#x27;t the author do the same thing Firefox does, which also uses Widevine DRM with no issues?

Everyone has the ability to play non-obscure videos i.e. all of YouTube. (Including Premium originals!)How did &quot;DRM video player&quot; become part of the &quot;reasonable feature set&quot;?? Don&#x27;t most people use dedicated apps for Netflix anyway?

Just from creating a browser with a reasonable feature set, like, say, the ability to play non-obscure videos.

You&#x27;re drawing attention via hair splitting and pedantry. For most people who use their browser to stream content, it&#x27;s not a browser if it can&#x27;t use that content.

Flagging for inaccurate&#x2F;inflammatory title. Google isn’t stopping the author from creating a web browser.

This is true, but isn&#x27;t always possible if you want to ship within a reasonable time frame.

As I often write here on HN: &quot;Learn the lessson not to make yourself dependent on a despot.&quot;.

The situation would be the same, if his web browser was a fork of Firefox.

If only we&#x27;d been warned about the risks of handing over so much influence to Google by basing everything around their browser... &gt;-&lt;

I use my own personally modified version of brave. Why did my above comment get downvoted ?

out of curiosity, which browser(s) do you use?

Anywhere that namespaces aren’t supported. It steps privs down after startup. I’m amused at this post getting marked down so much

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.unity.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;why-does-chrome-sandbox-need-root-rights-suid-set.365818&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.unity.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;why-does-chrome-sandbox-need...</a>

Huh, i guess that confirms widevine&#x27;s illicit use of pushing unsigned libraries is being covered up.

I wont use browsers with widevine. I refused to include widevine in any browser I worked on. Widevine is clearly a backdoor and chrome is often installed setuid root

Because OP is using a Chromium-based browser which has only one option.

I would guess that Firefox&#x27;s approach is only possible, because Mozilla made sure it is. I doubt that anyone else is allowed to &quot;redistribute&quot; the binary by automatically downloading it at runtime without getting a license.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;widevine&#x2F;troubleshooter&#x2F;6027072" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;widevine&#x2F;troubleshooter&#x2F;6027072</a>

How does firefox manage to play drm content? Maybe OP could use firefox&#x27;s approach? Someone mentioned below that redistributing is not allowed, but downloading at runtime is ok. Not sure about it, but if anyone knows about this, please explain it to the rest of us.

Can&#x27;t those proprietary binaries be used in another browser? Is the API known?

Building Chrome requires downloading proprietary binaries that they licensed. Chromium does not include these and does not include widevine by default, but it can be installed as a plugin.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;chromium#Widevine_Content_Decryption_Module_plugin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;chromium#Widevine_Conte...</a>

Chromium browser is open source.Chrome browser (which is based on Chromium, plus various Google proprietary features on top of it) is not.

Is the Chrome web browser buildable from sources?If yes, what&#x27;s the difference which allows Chrome to work with DRM and doesn&#x27;t allow another code to do that?I don&#x27;t think I understand the problem. What does it mean &quot;won&#x27;t allow DRM&quot; - you can always write code which you like, right?

&quot;I tried creating an Electron app with Widevine support and Google won&#x27;t let me.&quot;

This sucks, I know how bad if feels when you rely on a major vendor that can make or break your product. I was somewhat relieved that it happened when I already abandoned the project for a better one but had I invested more time into it I would have been furious.The only thing I wonder here is that DRM was a thing when he started working on this project, didn&#x27;t he see this coming? By this I mean that project research should start with the hardest part, at least that&#x27;s what I usually do.

DRM is just another extension of the lockup of information. Sadly, the information age ended up doing the opposite than I hoped. We should be pushing for a more free and open thinking society, instead we are capitalising all information while banning any dissenters.

Here is a good talk on that topic[1].Widevine does not come bundled with Firefox &amp; Chrome.
Each installation has to download the Widevine binary.
You would be able to use the binary to implement DRM support, like Kodi did.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3Y3R_snaDDc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3Y3R_snaDDc</a>

I didn&#x27;t follow the extension workaround. Won&#x27;t google block that as well, or are the different rules for extensions?Also, thanks for pushing on them. I&#x27;ve seen numbers posts on HN recently about the opaque walls folks encounter on Google, Amazon and Facebook property monopolies. This is just another great example. Would it make sense to file this with the EFF? Someone has to be collecting all of these issues for the impending class-action suit?

The real issue I see is that there is no commercial appetite for such a solution and that this world is so dominated by humongous corporations that things like this simply have no solution.

DRM is not compatible with open source approach. So ditch DRM if you are making an open source browser. You&#x27;ll deal with less garbage in result.

This definitely looks like a convenient feature although it&#x27;s something I would ideally have added right into Chrome. It is not really related to the streaming&#x2F;syncing responsibilities of the app. Any site which plays video could benefit from this non-window-resize-fullscreen feature.Another option could be creating two extensions: one for the video syncing, and one for the non-window-resize-fullscreen. That way if the latter gets rejected it wouldn&#x27;t affect the former.Note I&#x27;m sure some people definitely prefer the desktop app approach and I wish you all the best getting the approvals you need for that. This is just how I would prefer to use it.

This is sort of a ridiculous hack, but you could probably override Element.prototype.webkitRequestFullscreen, and manually resize the element to take up the whole browseer window rather than entering fullscreen.

There are some features which make a desktop application more appealing to me. One feature required changing browser behavior [1] which wouldn&#x27;t otherwise be possible.A WebExtension could work, but has potential to run into the same gatekeeping issue of being removed by Google from their Web Store. With Google having ~70% market share, this wouldn&#x27;t be a good outcome.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;pull&#x2F;17203" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;electron&#x2F;electron&#x2F;pull&#x2F;17203</a>

Google is being blatantly anticompetitive here and it&#x27;s definitely not fair to OP. But as an aside, I actually would prefer this functionality to be provided by a browser extension rather than a separate app, like the OP describes at the end of the article. Please pursue this option! I think it would be much more convenient than having to launch a separate app, even if the functionality is reduced.

Yes there are many more examples not widely known where Google is abusing their monopoly.
Firebase fcm push notification system is a good example. 
If you want to implement your own push notification service on android phones. Well too bad. Only Google is allowed to have special privileges so that their firebase service on phones works  even when a phone is in doze mode.
If you run into firebase quota issues like our company is having it is just too bad.

Did Metastream ask for a license to redistribute the binary?We don&#x27;t know anything about the conversation with Widevine other than that they wrote, &quot;I&#x27;m sorry but we&#x27;re not supporting an open source solution like this&quot;. They clearly are supporting an open source solution like Firefox. So what is the difference, and can Metastream be less &quot;like this&quot; and more like Firefox?

&gt; Download and sandbox the Widevine binary blob the same way that Firefox does. Done.Mozilla has a license to redistribute the binary. You can&#x27;t simply do that (legally).

&gt; Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source project.Chrome is not an open-source browser. Chromium is, and Chromium doesn&#x27;t have Widevine support.Download and sandbox the Widevine binary blob the same way that Firefox does. Done.

I don&#x27;t see the issue here, no video or audio content is being streamed. It&#x27;s only state such as time and play&#x2F;pause.

So he tried to create a chromium based browser which sync the DRM protected video playback with other peer and blocked by Google. He totally deserved it. He was just wasting time to build software on top of evil DRM.

There might be potential for Microsoft&#x27;s PlayReady DRM with their move to a Chromium-based browser. I contacted them while waiting to hear back from Widevine and got this response.&gt; For Windows Electron&#x2F;Chromium will not work with PlayReady at this time. I have provided your feedback to the engineering team for future planning. Currently PlayReady can be integrated in a PWA&#x2F;(Windows Store HTML&#x2F;JS app) and there would be no royalties on Windows.

Out of curiosity, is there any reusable alternative for Google&#x27;s Widevine module? It seems both Chromium and Firefox use this, and all other open source browsers are based on them. Safari and Internet Explorer DRM would be tied to specific platforms and also not reusable, I&#x27;m guessing?How (re)usable is Adobe&#x27;s Primetime DRM for something like this? Primetime was removed from Firefox in version 52 (pre-Quantum) in early 2017 [1]. Are there any others?[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;firefox-52-adobe-primetime-cdm-removal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;firefox-52-adobe-primetime...</a>

Sooo the author builds a browser with the assumption that he just can use DRM stuff?Thats an assumption i would say is not given. If you build something like this and you expect to support DRM, do your homework on DRM before you start building stuff around it.

All this content having DRM drives me totally crazy. I don’t have a windows machine or games console where I live that can output 4K, but I have a laptop and desktop running various Linux distros that both have very nice 4K monitors. It appears that the only places where I can get content that will play at native quality on them is through the usual illegitimate sources or through breaking BD drm. Anyone who says that this (Netflix, Amazon etc) is a smooth process doesn’t care about quality (or heaven forbid offline access). I’m sure Netflix likes the free reduction in bandwith for desktop users though...

It is in the AUR (arch-linux user repository). Packages in there are submitted by the community and there is deliberately some barrier to installing them, including requiring that you build them yourself (this is because the packages are not vetted before they are posted, and they could be malicious).

There is no such package &#x27;chromium-widevine&#x27; in the Arch Linux repository.sudo pacman -S chromium-widevineerror: target not found: chromium-widevine

Basically it&#x27;s possible to download Google Chrome and extract it:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;aur.git&#x2F;tree&#x2F;?h=chromium-widevine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;aur.git&#x2F;tree&#x2F;?h=chromium-wide...</a>Basically Arch Linux Downloads Google Chrome, Extracts the *.so file and puts it into the chromium lib directory. (This could&#x27;ve been done in his own browser aswell.

Every user in a session will see the same playback timestamp for a video.

What is &quot;synchronized playback&quot;?

Open an EU anti-trust case. If you&#x27;re not an EU citizen try finding someone who can take it to the EU who is, or look into whether you can get the EU to act on your behalf anyway.

I wonder if you could fight DRM content in Japan. Last week there was a story on HN about a few people being prosecuted for spreading a virus which was actually just a javascript trick. DRM seems like it would fall under the same category.

Widevine is the DRM component used in chromium based browsers. You need a license from them to run DRM based content in your browser. Widevine was purchased by Google in 2010<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Widevine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Widevine</a>

Google blocked... what? The blogpost shows the answer from Google, but crucially omits to say what exactly the author was asking for.

He said the browser cannot be completed because Google won&#x27;t allow their stuff to be used in an OSS project. It&#x27;s clear he never countenanced the possibility that * gasp * somebody could deny him access to their software. He might have offered to pay, but the substance is basically the same: he assumed he could get access to somebody else&#x27;s stuff, when there was no such guarantee (if anything, Google carefully insulating it from Chromium should have been a big hint of things to come).

I see nothing indicating that he wouldn&#x27;t opt to write a compliant DRM plugin at his own cost, or pay for the license or plugin if it were required.

(Burning some karma...)So he built an app that is a thin layer over someone else’s app, to play someone else’s content, and he’s upset he cannot get for free the nice things someone else paid for (in development time). My heart bleeds.

I&#x27;d be happy to use one browser for Netflix and another browser with better privacy&#x2F;security&#x2F;adblock&#x2F;anti-track&#x2F;bookmarking&#x2F;speed for everything else. I&#x27;m already in this world: I use Brave for most things, except for a banking site where it doesn&#x27;t work.\The browser should explain clearly what&#x27;s wrong and what to do when a site requires DRM. Don&#x27;t be like QuickTime, where opening any unsupported file bounces you to a FAQ page where the question you most likely have (&quot;how do I view this video&quot;) leads to a huge run-around.

It doesn&#x27;t. It transmits playback state, but doesn&#x27;t stream any video or audio content. Each user needs to be logged into web services on their own client.

&gt;But his project&#x27;s purpose is to literally broadcast media to your friendsJudging from the repo, there is no broadcast of content. Please take the time to read and think critically before you react with misinformation

Is this a late april fools joke?&quot;Metastream: Watch streaming media with friends.&quot;He&#x27;s complaining that they won&#x27;t let him use DRM. But his project&#x27;s purpose is to literally broadcast media to your friends.DRM exists to prevent that.

Interestingly, Amazon prime didn&#x27;t give me HD video on Ubuntu chrome, but worked and gave me 1080p if I changed the user agent to a recent windows one, in chrome.Still can&#x27;t get 4k anywhere.

I&#x27;m pretty sure there are options, none of which are efficient, but here they are:1. Firefox consumes the Widevine as a plugin, and the way to load that may be a straightforward one, through an interface.2. Support a different DRM scheme that has an open interface and is popular3. Disassemble Widevine or talk to hackers who&#x27;ve understood it. Clean room disassembly is legal in many parts of the world.4. Don&#x27;t drop this project, but put up a placeholder and evangelise better DRM standards. Pretty sure that if it involves crypto and it&#x27;s not open source, it is an attractive target with an exploit in the works. That&#x27;s what it is going to lead to, and by then you&#x27;d already have a working implementation.

I use chromium and Widevine works fine (Netflix works fine)

I use chromium, Widevine and the related sites work just fine here.

This is correct, I use chromium - netflix and amazon do not work... the rest of the web is perfectly fine though.It may have been a stupid decision for W£C to include DRM in the spec, but frankly the rest of the internet doesn&#x27;t give a shit - As far as OSS is concerned it&#x27;s another 3rd party blob like flash and not a true part of the web. As far as I can tell the author is trying to use this third party blob specifically - not the rest of the browser for which no one has any authority in the creation of...

I use Brave and Netflix and PrimeVideo work fine. How does that happen?

Chromium can download and install the Widevine module, just as Firefox can. The Widevine module, however, is closed source and proprietary.

I use Chromium&#x2F;Firefox and Widevine … sometimes works.
For example, Chromium recently broke Widevine support; this was the Gentoo thread about it at the time, IIRC: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.gentoo.org&#x2F;viewtopic-t-1080874-start-0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.gentoo.org&#x2F;viewtopic-t-1080874-start-0.html</a>.So, switched to Firefox. Firefox then also had it break on Debian&#x2F;Gentoo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1475260" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1475260</a>.Chromium, and other FOSS browsers including Firefox, do support Widevine. It is a giant proprietary binary blob, yes, but there&#x27;s support for it. (And yes, I wish everyone would adopt and obey the tenants of free software, but alas.)

&gt; ...the creators of the open source browser Chrome, ...This assumption is a mistake the author is making. Chrome is, for all practical purposes, closed-source and proprietary. It&#x27;s Chromium that is open-source. So far as I know, Chromium does not have Widevine included by default.

Another story to add to the long list of &quot;don&#x27;t like X? just create your own&quot; fails thanks to the monoliths running the internet

&gt; In the same way, part of building a web browser is having the ability to render web content. If Google can block your custom browser from rendering content, then for all practical purposes they are blocking your ability to build a browser.Eh.. in a way, but not really. It can still work as a web browser but a web site can still render however they&#x27;d like based on your user agent.If I made a site today, I could add the same functionality if I wanted to. Since I own the site, that&#x27;s my choice.I completely agree that Google should _not_ block their content based on your custom web browser. That is evil.

I never meant to suggest that this wasn&#x27;t a big deal, just that the title was intentionally dramatic to get more views.

&gt; If a single company can effectively decide whether a bunch of 3rd party sites that they don&#x27;t control work on your browser, how is that any different?Because those third party sites choose to utilise closed software from that company. And Netflix doesn&#x27;t only utilise Widevine as a DRM, it uses several different DRM systems, so Google don&#x27;t have control over anything.

To be fair, I think that it&#x27;s primarily the content owners pushing this ridiculousness. OP&#x27;s project is not a general purpose browser, and it will not compete substantially with any Google products, so I don&#x27;t think this is a case of Google trying to knock out OP.I completely agree that this is unacceptable... but I think the blame really rests on the content owners who forced this DRM in the first place. Every damn thing on Netflix is widely available on torrents in hours, so it&#x27;s totally useless and just makes things worse for everyday consumers.

&gt; If a single company can effectively decide whether a bunch of 3rd party sites that they don&#x27;t control work on your browser, how is that any different?That&#x27;s just a sensationalistic as the headline. There isn&#x27;t a single company controlling and selling these modules. There is a several of them, in open competition. The OP chose Widevine because they are easiest, but with sufficient perseverance he could probably use any of them, or at least any that distribute x86 binaries. It&#x27;s damned near impossible to prevent someone from running a binary if they really want to.I also found the original article difficult to swallow. It gave very little detail - so little we have no idea what Widevine said no to. For example, was it &quot;could you provide Widevine and loan me an engineer to help me integrate it with my browser - but I can&#x27;t pay you because it&#x27;s all open source&quot;. Or was it &quot;I&#x27;ve got it all going, I&#x27;m willing to pay you commercial rates per licence - how can I buy licences?&quot; It if is the former hats off to Widevine for replying at all.As it is, we only get a small part of his side of the story, no insight at all into why Widevine reacted they way they did, and a headline that&#x27;s guaranteed to get clicks.Call me paranoid, but I get the feeling I&#x27;m being manipulated.

If a single company can effectively decide whether a bunch of 3rd party sites that they don&#x27;t control work on your browser, how is that any different? Google is effectively deciding that anyone other than pre-approved browsers can&#x27;t play Netflix content.If an ISP fully embraced the Net Neutrality repeal and started blocking video content, and someone posted on HN that ISPs were &quot;blocking them from building a streaming service&quot;, no one would be complaining that, &quot;technically you can build it, you just can&#x27;t reach any of your customers.&quot; Everyone on HN would understand that part of building a service is the having the ability to reach customers.In the same way, part of building a web browser is having the ability to render web content. If Google can block your custom browser from rendering content, then for all practical purposes they are blocking your ability to build a browser.

EME does not require Widevine; you can implement EME in its entirety yourself, in open code.Widevine is only one of several implementations of a Content Decryption Module; it just so happens to be by far the easiest to license (though that doesn&#x27;t mean that&#x27;s easy!).

EME is part of web standards. So for some value of standards compliant web browser google can block you from implementing it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;2017&#x2F;REC-encrypted-media-20170918&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;2017&#x2F;REC-encrypted-media-20170918&#x2F;</a>

I mean, it&#x27;s a web browser aimed at media consumption. Not supporting DRM will sadly seriously restrict its usage.

It made the top of HN with 945 votes (2x the votes of anything else right now).  As much as we hear criticism of it on this site and elsewhere, clickbait headlines work.

It&#x27;s compatible.All OPs browser does is syncronse playback across users legitimate Netflix (or other) accounts.OPs broswer will pass the encrypted video through to the DRM plug-in, which will authenticate from Netflix through to the to the screen. It will decrypt the video, decode it, re-encrypt with hdcp and send it to the monitor.The DRM chain is intact. OPs browser can&#x27;t be used to pirate the videos, or steal Netflix.All he needs is permission to ship the closed source DRM plug-in.

Absolutely. The title isn&#x27;t just sensational, it&#x27;s misleading. OP&#x27;s browser is opensource and uses a P2P-like architecture. It sounds incompatible with current rights management.OP sounds like he feels entitled to others&#x27; work and efforts. If he wants to play videos in his browser, he can make them. Or find people who will make videos for free for him.

It absolutely is blocking. You know as well as I do that this is a conversation that&#x27;s likely been had behind closed doors at Alphabet.

Yep I thought it was a legit new browser as well, but turned out we got another Webkit&#x2F;chromium-based thing. Meh.

I also find the title to be rather sensational..  &quot;I tried creating a web browser&quot; ^ &quot;Google blocked me&quot; implies that Google blocked them from creating a web browser.. which is not the case.

Poland is an EU member, so your government must have some implementation of the EU Copyright directive, which includes somewhat similar anti-circumvention clauses as the DMCA[0].There are lots of differences in the details, but I wouldn&#x27;t make a blanket statement that it&#x27;s completely legal without actually checking the corresponding laws.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Copyright_Directive#Technological_protection_measures" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Copyright_Directive#Technologi...</a>

&gt; in Poland it is perfectly legal to watch copyrighted material as long as you don&#x27;t redistribute it.Be careful with that one. The Netherlands had that too until some European court decided that our laws were foolish and went &quot;that&#x27;s all wrong, it&#x27;s obviously illegal&quot; after which there was case law about it being illegal and now it&#x27;s illegal. The ministry immediately went &quot;oh, well, we s&#x27;ppose it&#x27;s illegal then from roundabout last week!&quot;In case you were wondering who&#x27;s behind this expensive lawsuit that lasted from 2008 to 2014: we had &quot;home copy tax&quot; (thuiskopieheffing), so you pay a few bucks extra for storage devices (hard drives, usb sticks, smartphones) and that was redistributed to rights holders as compensation for &quot;home copies&quot; (copies for personal use in your household, backups, that sort of thing). Shops did not like that they had to pay extra taxes that they did not have to pay in other countries, so they went to court and got us where we are now.Dutch news about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tweakers.net&#x2F;nieuws&#x2F;95332&#x2F;nederland-mag-illegaal-downloaden-niet-toestaan.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tweakers.net&#x2F;nieuws&#x2F;95332&#x2F;nederland-mag-illegaal-dow...</a>&gt; Nederland stelt dat het downloaden van dergelijk materiaal hetzelfde is als het kopiëren van een cd of dvd, maar daar gaat het Europese Hof niet in mee. Volgens het Hof kan een wet die &#x27;geen enkel onderscheid maakt tussen kopieën uit geoorloofde bronnen en kopieën uit vervalste bronnen&#x27; niet worden gedoogd, omdat dergelijke wetgeving auteursrechtinbreuk kan bevorderen.Translated:~ The Netherlands claims that downloading of such material is the same as copying a cd or dvd, but the EU court does not agree. According to the EU court, a law that makes &#x27;no distinction can be made between copied from allowed sources and from forged sources&#x27; can be allowed, because such laws promote copyright infringement.Dutch news about the government&#x27;s response: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tweakers.net&#x2F;nieuws&#x2F;95335&#x2F;kabinet-nederland-heeft-per-direct-downloadverbod.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tweakers.net&#x2F;nieuws&#x2F;95335&#x2F;kabinet-nederland-heeft-pe...</a>&gt; Het is in Nederland per direct verboden om auteursrechtelijk beschermd materiaal te downloaden uit illegale bron, bijvoorbeeld via torrentsites en nieuwsgroepen. Dat stelt het kabinet in een reactie op een uitspraak van het EU-hof.Translated~ It is in the Netherlands henceforth prohibited to download copyrighted material from an illegal source, for example through torrent sites and newsgroups. This is the ministry&#x27;s response to the ruling of the EU court.So we didn&#x27;t need any law change, parliamentary debate, nothing. It was in effect right away.

&gt; (I&#x27;m not a lawyer, just reading some of the more technical law articles)I&#x27;d advise not giving out bad advice then stating absolutes about the legal situation that are wrong.

or Cambodia, which has some interesting laws on copyright that effectively mean foreign copyrights are not enforceable there.

I also read many articles claiming that it is legal to watch copyrighted material, as long as it is not redistributed. However I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s actually true.As per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Polish_Copyright_Law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Polish_Copyright_Law</a>Article 23, paragraph 1:&gt; It shall be permitted to use free of charge the work, which has been already disseminated for purposes of private use without the permission of the author.Article 6, point 3:&gt; the disseminated work shall mean a work which, with a permission of its author, has been made available to the public by any means whatsoeverSo, it is legal to access the work without permission, if author gave prior permission to make it available to the public. However I&#x27;m not sure if selling a book in a store or showing a movie in a cinema would automatically mean that such work can be downloaded freely from the Internet - technically the work is available to the public, but I&#x27;m sure the author did not give permission for the work to be available on the Internet.

The above is most probably for US based clients.
E.g. in Poland it is perfectly legal to watch copyrighted material as long as you don&#x27;t redistribute it.It is also legal to do a reverse engineering of software to allow it to run on your system, software, hardware (so I think a browser also applies).(I&#x27;m not a lawyer, just reading some of the more technical law articles)

&gt; ...but unfortunately they&#x27;re so weighted toward the &quot;owner&quot; of the IP that they do (IMHO serious) harm to regular users and consumers.To the established owners of IP. If you&#x27;re not an established creator, you&#x27;re going to be on the side that gets hurt by the IP. Some IP claims are gonna hit you sooner or later, and even if they&#x27;re complete bullshit, you won&#x27;t be able to do anything about them.Established owners can generate enough of a fuss that they could cause an outrage big enough for some actual human to look into your issues, but if you&#x27;re not big enough for that... tough luck. Try again from scratch once Google cuts you out. This happens regularly across their products, be it Google Play, YouTube, or Chrome&#x27;s extensions store.

The government is propping up the companies because that&#x27;s what the companies made happen.  Your framing suggests that government did this on its own.  It did not.  The outsized ability of companies to influence the government is the core problem that must first be solved.  It is the root of most people&#x27;s gripes with the government.

Completely agree. Those government believe that protecting intellectual property is necessary to further human and societal progress. I won&#x27;t take a position on whether I agree with that or not.However, based on that premise they&#x27;ve instituted rules to &quot;protect&quot; intellectual property, but unfortunately they&#x27;re so weighted toward the &quot;owner&quot; of the IP that they do (IMHO serious) harm to regular users and consumers. It seems to me that regardless of which political side you fall under, we should agree that governments exist to protect the rights and interests of everyone, not just a select few.Something is really wrong here, and getting mad at Google or Widevine or some other company is a red herring. The real problem is what we&#x27;ve allowed our government(s) to do. We need to fight back there. Once the government isn&#x27;t propping up the companies anymore, their abuse will disappear.

&gt; What if you design a web browser that just ignores most blobs of CSS&#x2F;Javascript and renders content in a very different way.that describes every command line &#x2F; terminal web browser.

Pretty soon web traffic will be decrypted and rendered via site specific web assembly blobs that will do everything in their power to defeat custom rendering.  The modern web has just begun, and the powers that be are still grappling with its control.  So we&#x27;re still living in a comparative wild-west, but you can see the writing on the wall in every direction you look online right now.

This is what pisses me off aboit ads and data consumption pay rates: if i am paying for “1GB” of data, then i should have full control over how that data gets consumed by the content i am accessing over that paid pipe. Period.

It&#x27;s a dangerous precedent. Think about adblock. You&#x27;re just choosing to render the data websites give to you differently.What if you design a web browser that just ignores most blobs of CSS&#x2F;Javascript and renders content in a very different way. Are you now breaking copyright? Because you&#x27;re rendering the data differently than the W3C standard or blocking certain elements?I realize this is specifically about DRM content, but I feel like it won&#x27;t be a stretch to try to apply these laws to common content.Lets all start running Gopher servers again... Fuck the modern web.

It&#x27;s thanks to the obscene profits of the entertainment industry that they&#x27;re able to lobby to rob us of our rights.Try not to help them by paying for entertainment.

Fun fact: due to the situation of CS in late USSR, Russia still has a law preserving the right to reverse engineer any software over any agreement or license.

&gt; Let&#x27;s add the US Congress and the EU to the long list of parties to blame for the DRM situation. &quot;Reverse engineering&quot; software for the purposes of &quot;circumventing&quot; copyright is illegal.That does depend on the countries, at least on my case in France there&#x27;s an accessibility exception which makes it okay in his case to break the DRM legally because he does not have any other choice.

Let&#x27;s add the US Congress and the EU to the long list of parties to blame for the DRM situation. &quot;Reverse engineering&quot; software for the purposes of &quot;circumventing&quot; copyright is illegal.&quot;Circumventing&quot; is much more broadly defined than it should be.It&#x27;s not just illegal to redistribute copyrighted material. That&#x27;s the point of copyright and has been the case for a long time. It&#x27;s also illegal to watch&#x2F;consume content yourself in any way that the copyright-holder didn&#x27;t explicitly enable, even if you have a general right to watch&#x2F;consume that content. You&#x27;re not allowed to create a browser that can watch DRM-protected Netflix content. And if someone does create such a browser, it&#x27;s illegal for you to use it, even if you pay for a Netflix subscription.That&#x27;s pretty new (circa 1996 or so).In 2002 I went to see Lawrence Lessig argue the Supreme Court challenge of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which introduced these anti-circumvention concepts. Here are my notes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allafrica.com&#x2F;staff&#x2F;kwindla&#x2F;eldred.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allafrica.com&#x2F;staff&#x2F;kwindla&#x2F;eldred.txt</a>

I think its logical step on the part of Google. They invested in integrating Widevine in Chrome and they want it to be a distinguishing feature of Chrome. Why do you expect a profit seeking company to help their own competition?

Is there anything preventing a Firefox-derived project from using the Widevine CDM plugin? Or does that only work with official builds from Mozilla?

I hear you, it seems that technology is all about stonewalling these days...I&#x27;m trying to bring to light a bug that allows to skip Ads in YouTube (no add-ons, extensions, etc.), but just can&#x27;t get any attention: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;maketechfair" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;maketechfair</a>

What IS the point of video DRM anyway? I can&#x27;t remember a single instance of a thing I wanted to watch not being available for torrenting over the years, maybe barring some really obscure television episodes I wouldn&#x27;t find on Netflix anyway. I do pay for (most of) the content I watch these days (now that I can kinda-sorta afford it), but it&#x27;s not because it&#x27;s not available one thepiratebay search away. Mainstream stuff usually comes out within hours of the release.

Regarding the product, is this for allowing friends to watch Game of Thrones and other shows together remotely?Because I had this idea and was wondering what tech would be required to solve it.

“I forked Chromium and Google refuses to give me the proprietary bits” seems to be a better headline IMHO.

Wouldn&#x27;t a WebExtensions get you further out of the walled garden? Electron you&#x27;re stuck with Blink where WebExtensions work with Gecko and Webkit as well.

Worse still, if this offers an enhanced interface or &quot;unwanted&quot; options over YouTube, it&#x27;s likely the extension itself may well not make it into the store. To make matters worse is side-loading of extensions is pretty much a non-starter for Chrome now that dev-mode is a nag screen on each start (at least last time I used it).I had a couple side loaded extensions, and the nag got me to do what google wanted, stop using them altogether.

He addresses this point specifically in his post ... developing it as an extension would reduce the features he can support, and further entrench it in google&#x27;s walled garden (since he&#x27;d have to publish it on the chrome store).I don&#x27;t have much more context in this person&#x27;s project than anyone else, but your response is kind of the point, one vendor has too much power because they can&#x27;t be expected to support any kind of innovative ecosystem; yeah, that&#x27;s not a great state of affairs, and begins to echo&#x2F;suggest anti-competitive practices (whether on purpose, or just as a function of their size)

Although you make some valid points it should not be main practice for companies to dominate the software scene, how else did the original great SW get made?  It&#x27;s almost impossible to start a garage band company and this is like large trees in the canopy shading out more light to the forest floor.  Granted, it&#x27;s not the best or only example of this interaction, but independent devs need equal representation against the Giants especially in starting new products.

This is why everyone used to understand the need to regulate in a way that promotes competition. The idea was promote.

Amazon has customers that they sell products to. Google has products (us) that they sell info about to others. It&#x27;s kind of a big difference.

I don&#x27;t see your point. For products you pay for, you can get Google support in seconds as well.This really isn&#x27;t a customer support question.

&gt; expecting any kind of response from a vendor with such a large percentage of the market is... kinda arrogant.Are you saying Google is too big to be responsible?Amazon is huge, and I&#x27;m able to get a customer service represenatitve in seconds.

How does Firefox accomplish it? They (appear) to download the module on-demand.

It is a problem that they had to ask.This line of thought is exactly how companies take over open markets and kill them. Google proposes:A) &quot;It&#x27;s fine for DRM to be standardized, because anyone can just ask us to use implementations like Widevine.&quot;then follows up withB) &quot;We can&#x27;t possibly be expected to handle every single request that we&#x27;re given! Give us a break, this is hard.&quot;If Google wants to be the web&#x27;s gatekeeper for who&#x27;s allowed to stream video, then yes, they&#x27;d better be really stinking attentive to little hobby projects and startups. Because they chose to take on that responsibility.If they don&#x27;t want that responsibility, then all they have to do is stop gatekeeping. Distribute Widevine as a binary blob, but come up with some universal terms so that any browser can download and distribute it without asking permission.

&gt; Waiting 4 months for a minimal response from a vendor with&gt; such a large percentage of the market is unacceptable.Umm... expecting any kind of response from a vendor with such a large percentage of the market is... kinda arrogant.Who are you to demand any kind of response from anyone? Big project or small? You&#x27;d probably be less offended if you had a better sense of self awareness about the nature of your relationship with Google.Thinking that Google should kowtow to your desire to build a product is pretty foolish. You need to build a product and get some traction and then have some leverage. Widevine is evil. Google is evil.... but so is Electron, and requiring your users to use a custom browser to use your product &#x2F; feature. How about an Web Extension that coordinates playback in the browser, as opposed to a whole custom browser?

I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me