Getting Widevine to work on all platforms with Electron 5.0.0

[Scrumplex]

I have searched for a way to implement Widevine with modern Electron versions and found out, that the best way would be to package it ourselves. We would need to obtain versions of the Chrome Browser for each platform we build for and extract the widevinecdm library files. There are instructions here.

[oscartbeaumont]

I got maintainer on the electron-widevine plugin I am already using and would like to release it again once I get it working to help the community, not just this project. I have Widevine working on MacOS with the latest Electron release but it doesn't work on any other platform. Linux is a requirement (obviously) and Windows is something I would like but I am willing to ignore if need be. My progress can be seen in issue #2 , this playground repo and the Travis build status for that repo here. My repo downloads it directly from Google for the platform of the current system. I have been tracking the upstream issue here and still no progress on getting Linux working. This is something I am really hoping a fix can be found for soon as possible as the old Electron version probably has minor security vulnerabilities and is limiting other issues like adding Hulu as a service (issue #9).

[oscartbeaumont]

Please give getting it working on Linux with the latest Electron a shot and see if you can get it to work cause I am out of ideas or am just missing something, somewhere.

[Scrumplex]

I think the files from the dl.google.com server might be for Firefox. As Google Chrome also has a widevinecdmadapter library, that is not included in the zip archive. Afaik Firefox ships with it's own adapter library.

Edit: looks like it is not included anymore? Hmm. This needs further investigation

[oscartbeaumont]

It might be worth testing that then. I just find it annoying and weird that the Widevine works on Mac while not on Linux. I also tried extracting the Widevine from Chromium on my Linux machine and I could not get that working along with the direct Google download. The documentation page you linked (which I have read hundreds of time) is also outdated since the only working way (for Mac) requires setting the folder as the Widevine path and not the specific files. You can't set it as the same files as the documentation because Widevine (at least in Chrome) is not distributed with the same files anymore. If it is even possible and we get this working it might be worth doing a PR upstream to that documentation, to help people in the future as this seem like something quite a few people have struggled with throughout the versions of Electron.

[Scrumplex]

It actually seems like the command line flag for widevine is ignored. As even invalid paths don't cause any errors. I also extracted the widevine library from Google Chrome and tried using that instead, but with no success. This may very well be an upstream bug.

[oscartbeaumont]

It is really annoying that it doesn't produce errors when you mismatch versions or set an invalid path. The only way to tell if it is working is to test content or a DRM feature test website. It looks like nothing much is happening upstream which is quite annoying.

[Scrumplex]

This older project (using Electron 1.6.x) uses this adapter lib, too. So i am unsure, if it is actually required.

[Scrumplex]

But that can't be it, as the macOS package does not contain any adapter lib either.

[oscartbeaumont]

I don't know if it is required. I am leaning on the side of it not being required because the new working Mac version is missing one its files like Linux but this is only a guess and there aren't many public docs to help, thanks DRM!!!! All the other projects I searched for were using super old versions of Electron and did not help me much.

[oscartbeaumont]

Cool, thanks for putting that upstream. Hopefully, someone comes back with a solution or something that leads us in the correct direction!

[Scrumplex]

Looks like I overlooked something in the official documentation:

As of Electron v1.8.0 (Chrome v59),
the below steps are may only be some of the necessary steps to enable Widevine;
any app on or after that version intending to use the Widevine CDM may need to
be signed using a license obtained from Widevine
itself.

Looks like there is more to it than just loading that one library. They later refer to an Electron fork that is signed like this called castLabs Electron. Using that fork instead of the official Electron enables Widevine. I have a branch on my fork, where I use the fork instead.
Although they do say the following:

The provided builds are VMP-signed for development use, i.e. using Widevine UAT or servers accepting development clients. For production use a license agreement with Google Widevine is needed to get production certificates for re-signing the final package.
In the worst case you would need to request a VMP certificate from Google.

They also say that they support Windows and macOS, but I can confirm that it also works on Linux.

[oscartbeaumont]

I originally assumed that was the issue until MacOS was working on the latest Electron then I ruled it out cause it wouldn't make sense for a DRM feature like that to act differently between platforms (but I could be wrong). I applied for a VMP cert and unsurprising haven't got a reply and am not expecting one but it was worth a shot, in the Electron issues about Widevine people have reported it taking years to get certs and being an open source and small project we probably can't get them. The other thing about the message in the documentation is the Electron version being v1.8.0 but it is working on 4.x.x which also doesn't make sense.

[oscartbeaumont]

Brave has working Widevine (If you enable it in the browser), it's not Electron but it is javascript and they are only loading a single file as can be seen here. I am going to try the Widevine they are downloading it and see if it works in Electron.