What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

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Mike_Walsh
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What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

Unread post by Mike_Walsh » 2023-12-20, 01:49

The title IS the question. In some places on the forum I've seen it suggested that Basilisk supports it, in others hints that it doesn't/won't.

What's the true answer?


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Re: What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

Unread post by jobbautista9 » 2023-12-20, 02:08

Widevine (whatever left of it anyway) has been dropped from the platform a month ago. It will never be supported.

Issue #2346 (UXP)
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Re: What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2023-12-20, 02:49

Well, the reason why some parts of the forum say that it was supported, is that at one point it was true... after forking from Firefox and while there was still a lot of overlap in the codebase, there was a brief period of time where Widevine actually worked in Basilisk. This was before the current maintainer took over.

It should also be noted that dropping of Widevine support was not really by choice. Google simply wouldn't give us a license to use it, and we would have had to do a lot of work to get our EME stuff up to the level where it could even use Mozilla's copy of Widevine illegitimately (in a way that would likely require the user to have Firefox installed as well to work). The current maintainer inherited that problem from us, and decided he wasn't likely to have a solution either, so the plan of dropping EME went forwards.
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Re: What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2023-12-20, 14:06

athenian200 wrote:
2023-12-20, 02:49
Google simply wouldn't give us a license to use it
Google has made it clear in no uncertain terms they will not license WideVine to any true FOSS client.
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athenian200
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Re: What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2023-12-20, 17:54

Moonchild wrote:
2023-12-20, 14:06
Google has made it clear in no uncertain terms they will not license WideVine to any true FOSS client.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. I think the only remote possibility of supporting Widevine would be if someone were willing to make a closed-source Widevine NPAPI plugin for us (similar to Silverlight/Flash), someone who had signed an NDA with Google and would probably charge users for it. And I doubt that would even require EME in the browser itself, if they found a way to do it, because it would need to take place entirely within a black box implemented within the plugin.

But that might not even be possible, and even if it is possible, it is so unlikely as to not even be worth considering seriously.
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Re: What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

Unread post by Basilisk-Dev » 2023-12-21, 16:49

jobbautista9 wrote:
2023-12-20, 02:08
Widevine (whatever left of it anyway) has been dropped from the platform a month ago. It will never be supported.

Issue #2346 (UXP)
Adding onto this, all EME, DRM, and Widevine code has been completely removed from Basilisk as well.
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Re: What's the position re: Widevine in Basilisk?

Unread post by MamaForestCritter » 2024-01-21, 19:12

My simple solution is to have a separate 'streaming browser' so I can contain it. These days, with the activation of cloudflare, most streaming services will not even let you log in unless all privacy and add controls are unblocked. Since they seem bent on cracking people open with the lure of streaming, I'd just as soon contain it to a dedicated browser. I use vivaldi so I can sync to my phone and the internet assumes it is chrome.