Netflix, state of the art?

[PakoSt]

I don't believe the issue to be with libwidevine , @spikerguy .

I'm getting some rather conflicting information as to how to get it to work with the official Chromium. Whatever happened with v79+

Actually when reading more into this instruction set the problem with chromium 80 indeed appears to be with the user agent I'm trying to use and not widevine - I am seeing the video with BitMovin but it says No DRM detected. This is chromium 80 targeting armhf from the ubuntu repos.


In other observations - my attempt to push the Vivaldi install script failed. The why was more interesting - the script reported that it is on aarch64 as the host and not the arm v7 of the image I was trying to build (I'm far away from knowing how the container build process is made with Docker).
Installing the Vivaldi package without applying whatever trickery is needed for widevine fails - unlike with the ubuntu chromium 80, here the video isn't being played at all.

So, it seems to be a hunt for the correct user agent

In the mean time, I'm playing with the Dockerfile trying to use arch linux arm and just to grab the chromium-widevine package. This is more tricky than I expected as pacman spams error 502 when building the container Or I may end up reading later on about systemd-nspawn

[gleachkr]

I finally had a chance to try this out, and it works! Thank you to everyone involved here.

There was an issue I noticed, not sure if it's just me. Netflix videos seem to play smoothly, even fullscreen, but then freeze after a minute or two. They can be unfrozen by skipping forward 10 seconds.

The freezes seem deterministic - watching a video more than once causes it to freeze on exactly the same frames each time. The bad frames are maybe once every minute or two.

Some features of my present setup that might be relevant. I'm using xwayland, and mesa-git, but at commit ff8daa01362 (this is the one from manjaro-arm stable at the moment)

[spikerguy]

I finally had a chance to try this out, and it works! Thank you to everyone involved here.

There was an issue I noticed, not sure if it's just me. Netflix videos seem to play smoothly, even fullscreen, but then freeze after a minute or two. They can be unfrozen by skipping forward 10 seconds.

The freezes seem deterministic - watching a video more than once causes it to freeze on exactly the same frames each time. The bad frames are maybe once every minute or two.

Some features of my present setup that might be relevant. I'm using xwayland, and mesa-git, but at commit ff8daa01362 (this is the one from manjaro-arm stable at the moment)

Please move to mesa package and see if that fixes it. Also I had the issue only when I forced netflix with 1080p instead of 720p.

Thank you for the feedback. I will try to use it more to see if I can reproduce this issue.

[gleachkr]

@spikerguy, I checked with regular mesa, and it doesn't seem to make a difference. In either case, it's freezing on what appear to be exactly the same frames.

I'm not forcing 1080p, as far as I know.

---

I poked around a bit more, and the problem seems pretty intermittant.

Most videos play without trouble, I think I was just getting hung up on a video that reliably didn't (FWIW: the season one trailer for the midnight gospel, sorry for the bad taste).

Could this be an issue with the widevide version?

[spikerguy]

@spikerguy, I checked with regular mesa, and it doesn't seem to make a difference. In either case, it's freezing on what appear to be exactly the same frames.

I'm not forcing 1080p, as far as I know.

---

I poked around a bit more, and the problem seems pretty intermittant.

Most videos play without trouble, I think I was just getting hung up on a video that reliably didn't (FWIW: the season one trailer for the midnight gospel, sorry for the bad taste).

Could this be an issue with the widevide version?

Not really as I have watched a whole series on my PBP without any issue. 

Currently I am working on a package which will get all the work done to get chromium-Armv7h inside the docker with an application icon. This will have latest user agent and browser with latest widevine.
Hopefully that should fix the lag issue.

[spikerguy]

We have a stable Chromium-Armv7 application which can work quite smoothly on PBP and play netflix and Amazon as per my test. Some one can also try Spotify.

I have created a package called chromium-docker and uploaded in to unstable branch. It is a tiny pkg with a script which will fetch and install all the things needed for widevine, Chromium armv7 and dockers. 

Users can try it  from unstable branch, If you have existing dockers image then please remove it first using 
**This will remove all the docker images**
Command to remove existing/all docker images

Code:

sudo docker system prune -a --volumes

Command to install chromium-armv7 package

Code:

sudo pacman -U https://www.uex.dk/public/manjaro/arm-unstable/community/aarch64/chromium-docker-4.10.1610.6-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz

This package will take some time as it will download and install around 3Gig of data. Please try it on emmc as Sd-card will take long time for extraction of widevine.
After if is installed you will see Chromium-Armv7 in application launcher. 

Running it will get you chromium with HW Acc and Widevine.

Known issues:

• Setting page will crash
  
• Sometimes docker permission is not set.
  

For the permission to be set correctly where a user should be able to run docker without sudo, users will have to reboot once, If it doesn't help then pass the following command.

Code:

sudo groupadd docker

sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)

sudo reboot now

Can also watch in 1080p if you want, This will need to be added manually by the user. I have not enable it by default on purpose.
To enable Netflix-1080p Plugin inside Chromium

Navigate to Setting > More Settings > Extension > Enable Developer Mode > Load Unpacked > Browse /usr/lib/chromium-browser/netflix-1080p > Restart Chromium-Armv7

You can check the resolution on Netflix Video Player using Ctrl + Shift + Alt + D and Switch Resolution with Ctrl + Shift + Alt + S
You can set highest bitrate by default in option of netflix-1080p plugin also.

Thanks to @hthiemann  and @PakoSt for their effort.

Enjoy & Stay Safe.

Manjaro Arm Team.

[pfeerick]

We have a stable Chromium-Armv7 application which can work quite smoothly on PBP and play netflix and Amazon as per my test. Some one can also try Spotify.

You (or is it I?) have fantastic timing @spikerguy ! I was just reading through this thread, and was getting ready to start pulling stuff down to give it a try... and you then say you have a purpose built package ready to try out! I'll give it a try either tonight or tomorrow, and see how I go with Amazon Prime and Spotify.

Edit: So it ended up being tonight. Installed without any errors. When I tried to run it (it being 'Chromium-Armv7') after the reboot, I hit the permission error so did the

Code:

sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)
sudo reboot now

(as the group existed) and rebooted (logging and in out should be enough though for group permissions to be refresh though, shouldn't it?). Anyway, tried it again, started up perfectly. Logged into Amazon Prime, started watching some of Tales from the Loop (fullscreen even!!) and it seems to be playing just fine. Then logged into open.spotify.com, and tried to play some music. Play button just spun for a bit, but did nothing, so I refreshed the tab, and then it worked, so was able to play some music from Spotify also! Great work!

[whiskey]

We have a stable Chromium-Armv7 application which can work quite smoothly on PBP and play netflix and Amazon as per my test.

Hi Spikerguy, Thanks this is just what many of us are hoping for.  I am getting a error in launching the new chrome:

Enabling XHost Forwarding
non-network local connections being added to access control list
Searching for Docker image ...
Found and using
"docker run" requires at least 1 argument.
See 'docker run --help'.
Usage:  docker run [OPTIONS] IMAGE [COMMAND] [ARG...]
Run a command in a new container

This was both after a reboot and after correcting permissions.

[PakoSt]

@whiskey  sounds like something went wrong during the container creation.
Could you uninstall the package and monitor the logs while its installing?


You could run the setup script for the container manually if you are up-to the task.

PS: Re-installing while the package is still on the system, doesn't trigger the container setup.

[whiskey]

@whiskey  sounds like something went wrong during the container creation.
Could you uninstall the package and monitor the logs while its installing?


You could run the setup script for the container manually if you are up-to the task.

PS: Re-installing while the package is still on the system, doesn't trigger the container setup.

Thanks PakoSt. It is launching after reinstall. Full screen Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. No more rebooting in Chromium OS!I