Firefox 49 To Offer Linux Widevine Support, Firefox Also Working On WebP Support

[mmstick]

Props to mozilla. Linux doesn't have video acceleration and has drm. While i am all for convenience (netflix etc) having the batteries emptying is something i would prefer not to have while watching vids.

Since when does Linux lack video acceleration? It's been working perfectly for many years now.

[My8th]

This brings up some questions:
- Who really wants to have DRM crap on linux?
- How exactly does this Widevine stuff work and what is it able to do?
- How can you disable it?

You can disable it in the Add-ons Manager.

[uid313]

I would like to see further e10s work, more Rust components, and most importantly Wayland support.

Nightly still does not work on Wayland.

Maybe deprecate some old stuff from the 90s.

[89c51]

Since when does Linux lack video acceleration? It's been working perfectly for many years now.

With flash i think it still works. But its better to voluntarily contact HIV than use flash.

Other than that it used to work with gstreamer. But they decided to move on. And since then no HW acceleration in video with VDPAU or VAAPI.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726

[jf33]

Since when does Linux lack video acceleration? It's been working perfectly for many years now.

Linux does have video acceleration, but Firefox for Linux doesn't use it. At least on my computer, YouTube videos still cause high cpu-load with Firefox. I think that's what 89c51 meant.

[xpris]

This brings up some questions:
- Who really wants to have DRM crap on linux?
- How exactly does this Widevine stuff work and what is it able to do?
- How can you disable it?

Who? Many users. DRM? Not like it but in some content is needed like Netflix and other. To play it we need use Chrome (with drm Widevine) or soon Firefox.
Widevine is not build in browser but it will be downloaded soon after first run (like Open h264). If you don't want it you can disable it in plugins option or use drm-free version of firefox from mozilla ftp (yep they prepare it)

Since when does Linux lack video acceleration? It's been working perfectly for many years now.

Not Linux but web browser. Look Chromium -> Chrome >Opera >Vivaldi - all have disable in default (even force disable) Hardware Acceleration on Linux. You can try it enabled in chrome:flag and you see all green (hardware accelerated) in chrome:gpu but is ilusion, they force disabled it. So if you want true enable you need compile chromium with custom flags or use PPA for Ubuntu called Chromium DEV PPA (this is build with force enabled hardware accelaration via VAAPI) - but this on some drivers cause lot of problems.

In Firefox on Linux side we still not have it. We can enabed OMTC OpenGL in about:config but this is still buggy on some gpu and drivers. Also hardware decoding h264 is also unavailable so If you playing in firefox h.264 you not get hardware decode but only software decode (for now we don't have any option to activate it, sorry :/ we need wait to implement it).

[starshipeleven]

I take it this is still a binary blob. I can (sadly) live with that but I guess it still rules ARM out?

I doubt it can happen officially, but Widevine DRM blobs are used in Android (as a plugin to the DRM system), iOS (like say here https://github.com/brightcove/bright...k-ios-widevine ) and also in ChromeOS on ARM devices (no duh!), so there are ARM blobs of that around.
Being Widevine DRM the Google's pet implementation of HTML5 DRM does have some benefits after all.

I hope it is just a matter of downloading a package legally then extracting the blob and installing it, as with pepperflash from Chrome.

[starshipeleven]

- Who really wants to have DRM crap on linux?

Everyone that wants to replace windows without compromises. Having DRM available does not mean I'm going to use it, just that in case I need it to see some site I MUST use (for work or for other reasons) I don't need to fire up a VM with windows.

- How exactly does this Widevine stuff work and what is it able to do?

http://www.widevine.com/wv_drm.html

- How can you disable it?

The same as all blobs. Find the file and delete it. This is what they look like http://www.widevine.com/download/videooptimizer

[jf33]

Is that Widevine plugin only for decrypting content, or is there any mechanism that tries to prevent the screen from being captured and such things? Because I wonder how you would prevent screen capturing in an open-source environment.

[Daktyl198]

Just a few notes:
1. Running Firefox Nightly on Windows 10, with Adobe Primetime disabled, trying to play videos on Netflix with Widevine didn't work. I tired both without, and with spoofing my user agent. Ran into an error while loading.
2. Yes, the video resolution will still be limited to 720p, as Widevine is the same DRM module as Chrome and they're limited too.
3. If you want to remove all DRM and stuff from your system, use the handy-dandy "Play DRM" checkbox in your Firefox settings. Unchecking it will also delete any files that have been downloaded to your system.