• dan@upvote.au
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    7 months ago

    In-browser DRM usually uses a library called Widevine, which is a closed-source library that’s usually only used on Windows or MacOS.

    On Linux, you can use Google Chrome to get Widevine working. You can also extract the library from Google Chrome to use it with Chromium (e.g. see https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine). The version of Chromium shipped with Linux distros doesn’t include it since you need a license and permission from Google to use and distribute it. Lots of Linux users would also really not want to run a DRM binary on their system.

    I don’t know what other Linux browsers do - I haven’t used Linux desktop for a while (going to switch back soon though). On other OSes, browsers like Firefox and Brave prompt you the first time you try to watch DRM’d content, asking if you’d like to download the plugin.