Issue with Widevine Persistence Licenses After Updating Castlabs App from 6.0.2 to 22.0.0

[rranjithk]

We are currently in the process of updating our CastLabs application from version 6.0.2 to version 22.0.0. However, upon completing the update, we've encountered an issue where existing offline Widevine persistence licenses are no longer functional.

Steps to reproduce:
Update the Castlabs application from version 6.0.2 to version 22.0.0.
Attempt to use existing offline Widevine persistence licenses.
Observe that the licenses are not working as expected.

Expected Behaviour:
After updating the Castlabs application from version 6.0.2 to version 22.0.0, existing offline Widevine persistence licenses should continue to function without any issues.

Actual Behaviour:
Existing offline Widevine persistence licenses are not working after the update to version 22.0.0 of the Castlabs application.

Any assistance or insights into resolving this issue would be helpful.

[khwaaj]

If you are trying to upgrade from 6.0.2 there are actually two things that can prevent this from working:

1. There was a major API update between ECS v15 and v16, when the CDM acquisition method went from using Lorry to the Component Updater (changing the build tag from -wvvmp to +wvcus). During this transition a change was made that will not allow loading persistent licenses stored prior to v16. This could be fixed in theory, but doing so will break persistent licenses for all releases after v16. For this reason changing this behavior is out of the question.
2. The CDM version differs between the CDM that stored the persistent license and the CDM that loads it. If there has been a security update the system id will have changed and the newer CDM will not be able to load the license. This is what was discussed in the previous issue you opened, Widevine Content Playback Issue with CastLab Electron Version 22 #179.

If either of the above happens all persisted licenses will need to be updated. There is no way to generally automate this, it needs to be implemented on a per-service basis using the EME API (as also discussed in the previous ticket, #179). Also take note of the fact that a license that fails to load is typically discarded by the CDM, so once a load fails the persisted session is gone.

[rranjithk]

@khwaaj ,
Thanks for the replay. Since we don't have other options to use existing licenses, we compromised and did the license downloads with the new CastLabs Electron version 22.0.0, but encountered an issue with updating the WidevineCDM component in my CastLabs Electron application to version 22.0.0 while keeping the "component_updates_enabled" flag set to false. Here's the scenario:

We recently updated our application to CastLabs Electron version 22.0.0.
In order to avoid potential issues with the latest Widevine releases, we set the "component_updates_enabled" flag to false during this update.
However, we observed that the WidevineCDM component isn't getting updated automatically to version 22.0.0 as expected, even for the first time.

As a consequence, when attempting to use offline licenses with the newly downloaded , they are not working

Our expectation was that during the update to version 22.0.0, the WidevineCDM component would be downloaded for the first time. However, it seems that due to the "component_updates_enabled" flag being false, this is not occurring.

We need guidance on how to achieve the following:

Update the WidevineCDM component to version 22.0.0 during the application update to CastLabs Electron version 22.0.0.
Ensure that subsequent updates do not consider the "component_updates_enabled" flag for the WidevineCDM component.

Could anyone provide guidance on how to achieve this? Is there a way to manipulate the "component_updates_enabled" option dynamically for this specific scenario?

[khwaaj]

I assume you are talking about the components.updatesEnabled API (which controls component_updates.component_updates_enabled)? If so, this is exactly the expected behavior. If this is set to false before a CDM is installed, one will never be installed.

What you need to do is set it to false after a CDM has been installed successfully. This would prevent updates, but you should be aware that this is only a stopgap solution. CDMs are periodically deprecated/removed and it will need to be updated sooner or later to continue working. And once that happens you need to handle the potential persistent license migration anyway.