Yeah i have a relative who wanted to switch to linux, due to windows being dog-shite, but she want's to have netflix with offline download feature.
Anyway it's a right pain in the arse.
I ended up going with the Waydroid emulator and using netflix android app.
It needs wayland so sadly I had to betray XFCE.
You can get it to work on the plain lineageOS waydroid image ( without gapps) - I think either via aurora app store or just sideload the apk into waydroid directly.
There's a waydroid utilities/helper script that installs widevine into the vitrual machine.
I got it working on stock debian+KDE(5), I'm not so sure about other distros but I assume GNOME would work fine also.
I looks like the downloading for offline view works, i'm not 100% sure whatll happen with disk space. And I didn't check the resolution available.
She's not actually switched over from windows yet, but we did a quick proof of concept.
I'm not sure if the waydroid route is easier or not but it's an option, and if you're wayland already that's one less hurdle.
UI through the emulator is s bit annoying, but manageable and you might be stuck with the android bar at the bottom so no true fullscreen.
Absolutely insane, the level of technical prowess and how much time and effort went into making something like this work. Although, DRM is cancer and shouldn’t exist, I can respect how this dude hacked it.
Great piece, impressive work; Fedora now ships widevine by default - and it’s not working anymore. I have a recent Asahi install, netflix won’t play (used to work at the time of this blog post).
Or you could buy it legally. What we need is a way to keep a lot of the crime at bay while making sure people who take the time to buy blurays and DVDs can still have a legal home library
I do not believe so. I use MakeMKV but that is not good practice as it is proprietary software. You can play Blurays with VLC but you need the decryption keys.
VLC literally includes optional DRM circumvention that on most GNU/Linux distributions you need to deliberately install in order to play Blu-rays and DVDs. Thus, the use of illegal tools (illegal in the U.S. at least) is the only way you can play these physical digital media on Linux distributions without DRM software.
It’s a worse issue though. Don’t forget that companies like Sony have put literal rootkits onto their audio CD’s as part of protection. And lots of owners have gotten screwed by updated protection schemes on legitimate hardware (which is why companies like Dune HD seemed to give up)
You’re not only giving them permission to play back a movie, but, on BluRays, you give them permission to run code too on your player.
The house always wins with BluRays. They’re not cheap, they can fail prematurely, and you can’t back them up. And a lot of the companies have screwed us for decades now. It’s absolutely insane
Unless you’re buying from small companies, otherwise companies like Disney simply get more power
You don’t need there code to play blurays. All you need is the decryption keys. Don’t get me wrong, DRM is bad but I think blurays are no where near as bad as malware.
Unless you are part of a civil rights movement or something as equally just I have a hard time believing that. To quote Martin Luther King Jr.:
“We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself.”
Basically if you are committing piracy as some sort of morally right act then you should not hide in the shadows.
That is whataboutism of the highest order. This has nothing to do with the 60s civil rights movement. You need to “hide in the shadows” because else law enforcement kicks in your door and takes you to prison, or at best you need to pay a massive fine. All this need for obscurity and secrecy does not, however, take away from software piracy being a moral and righteous thing to do in any way. Don’t let corporations feed you bullshit.
Disney announced the end of physical media in Australia and New Zealand. Blackmarkets arise naturally when supply does not meet demand. It is preferable, morally and for society if people share media for free rather than fund organised crime as happens with most other black markets. I try and support creative industries where I can but piracy is the lesser evil in some cases.
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