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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Pipelight Brings Widevine Support For Linux Web Browsers

Pipelight, a project that allows you to install Silverlight to any Linux browser that supports the Netscape Plugin API (Firefox, Chrome, Midori), allowing you to use video streaming websites such as Neflix, has been updated yesterday, getting Widevine support and Linux windowless mode.

For those not familiar with Pipelight, this is a WINE browser plugin that was initially created to allow you to access services that require Microsoft Silverlight such as Netflix, LOVEFiLM, Maxdome and more, using native Linux web browsers. The plugin has evolved and besides Silverlight, it now allows using the Windows Adobe Flash Player in Linux browsers and, with the new 0.2.4 release, it also adds Widevine support.

Widevine is a browser plugin designed for viewing premium video content, used by websites such as HBO Go, Cinemax and many others. It is currently fully supported only on Windows and Mac OS X. On Linux, Widevine is bundled with Chrome browser but it's not largely used by websites as it's only compatible with a single browser.

According to the Pipelight 0.2.4 release announcement:

"The plugin itself does not work standalone and instead just offers DRM capabilities to the normal Flash plugin. While the Widevine plugin itself does all DRM related stuff like key exchange and decryption, the rendering is still done by the normal Flash plugin. Pipelight allows you to combine Widevine with either Windows, Linux or Pepper Flash."

Another change in the latest Pipelight 0.2.4 is the addition of Linux Windowless mode support, required by some Qt based browsers or browsers which do not support overlaying of normal windows like the OpenGL based Steam browser. Currently it's not recommended to use this mode if it's not necessary because it doesn't use hardware acceleration on it's own.

To enable this mode either set PIPELIGHT_WINDOWLESSMODE=2 to enable it for all plugins (caution for plugins that always use 3d rendering!) or set linuxWindowlessMode = true in the according plugin config. To do this, copy the config file to your ~/.config folder, then open it with a text editor such as gedit:

cp /usr/share/pipelight/pipelight ~/.config/pipelight
gedit ~/.config/pipelight

Pipelight 0.2.4 also introduces various speed improvements for Silverlight, especially for slow systems that were not able to rach the full frame rate and more.

For how to install Pipelight, how to enable Widevine and so on, see our initial article: Pipelight: Use Silverlight In Your Linux Browser To Watch Netflix, Maxdome Videos And More

Pipelight 0.2.0 Released With Multi-Plugin Support (Silverlight And Flash For Now)

Pipelight, a project that allows you to install Silverlight to any Linux browser that supports the Netscape Plugin API (Firefox, Chrome, Midori), has been updated today, receiving multi-plugin support.

Pipelight combines the effort by Erich E. Hoover (the Netflix Desktop developer) with a browser plugin (unlike Netflix Desktop which requires a Windows version of Firefox to run under Wine) which lets you access services that require Microsoft Silverlight, such as Netflix, LOVEFiLM, Maxdome and more, using native Linux web browsers.

With this release, Pipelight doesn't only handle Microsoft Siverlight but also the Windows version of Adobe Flash, which is a mandatory step to get Widevine (a browser plugin designed for viewing premium video content, supported only on Windows and Mac OS X and only with Chrome under Linux) DRM working in future releases.

The new version also brings the posibility to enable plugins on a per user basis instead of system wide as well as other changes such as:

easier Silverlight version switching;
added several wine patches to fix deadlocks and race conditions when using hardware acceleration with Silverlight;
added possibility to read plugin path from the registry, so that it is not necessary to update the configuration on a plugin update;
other bug fixes.

Install Pipelight

Ubuntu users can follow the updated instructions from our initial Pipelight article: Pipelight: Use Silverlight In Your Linux Browser To Watch Netflix, Maxdome Videos And More

For Arch Linux, Debian Wheezy / Jessie / Sid, openSUSE or if you want to compile Pipelight, see the official instructions.

Pipelight 0.2.7 Brings New System Check Tool, GPU Acceleration Enabled By Default For AMD Graphics

Pipelight is a wrapper for Windows NPAPI plugins such as Silverlight, Widevine or Flash (the Windows version) which allows you to use these plugins in native Linux web browsers and thus, use services that aren't officially supported on Linux, such as Netflix (Silverlight), HBO Go (Widevine) and so on.

Pipelight was updated to version 0.2.7 yesterday, bringing quite a few enhancements and bug fixes, such as a tool to check the system configuration and find issues that might cause Pipelight to fail, GPU acceleration for AMD graphics is now enabled by default for Silverlight and more.

Changes in Pipelight 0.2.7:

improved performance on AMD graphic cards as GPU acceleration is now enabled by default for Silverlight (on 64bit, you'll need the 32bit graphic driver files installed);
allow changing strict draw ordering at runtime via context menu;
new tool to check your system configuration for common issue (the tool checks if you have the correct graphic driver files, the fonts required by Silverlight, working ACLs / xattr and whether Wine can find all necessary libraries);
Firefox now correctly detects the Flash version string and it is no longer necessary to disable the regular Linux version of Flash as Firefox recognizes that the one provided by Pipelight has a higher version number;
fixed the latest Unity WebPlayer;
fixed crash caused by multiple running instances of a plugin;
updated plugins: Flash to 13.0.0.214, Shockwave to 12.1.1.151, Unity3D, Adobereader, FoxitReader and Roblox plugin;
a new experimental plugin called TrianglePlayer was added (the plugin is used to play the online game "The Lost Titans" - note that the Pipelight TrianglePlayer plugin is experimental and also, the plugin itself seems to contain some bugs).

A complete Pipelight 0.2.7 changelog can be found HERE.

To use the new system check tool, after installing Pipelight, use the following command:

pipelight-plugin --system-check

Some information about common issues can be found HERE.

For how to install Pipelight in Ubuntu and set up various plugins, see THIS article. For ther Linux distributions, check out the Pipelight installation instructions.

Important: starting with version 35, Google Chrome no longer supports NPAPI plugins so Pipelight won't work!

Pipelight 0.2.6 Released With Experimental 64bit Support, 2 New Plugins

Pipelight 0.2.6 was released yesterday and it brings changes such as:

added the ViewRight plugin which is used by some VOD services as DRM player. In this release the Caiway version of this plugin ("viewright-caiway") was added;
added a new Vizzed RGR plugin which ships an emulator to play old games;
64bit support for the following Pipelight plugins: Flash and Unity 3D. According to the Pipelight changelog, the 64bit plugins tend to be more buggy than the 32bit versions but the Pipelight team is working on fixing them. For now, this is considered experimental;
a work-around was added so it's no longer needed to change the browser user agent to be able to use Silverlight in Linux browsers. This might not work in all cases though.

The Pipelight 0.2.6 changelog also mentions that the Pipelight team is currently working on GPU decoding and they already have a working prototype which decodes mpeg2 on the GPU when using the windows version of VLC as player:

"There is still a lot of work left, but we hope that we can support GPU decoding for flash (and hopefully silverlight) in future versions".

For how to install Pipelight and its plugins in Ubuntu, see the following article: Pipelight: Use Silverlight In Your Linux Browser To Watch Netflix, Maxdome Videos And More

I didn't update our Pipelight article with instructions on installing 64bit plugins since this is currently experimental, but if you want to use this anyway, you can install the 64bit version of Windows Flash or Unity3D using the following commands (use them after installing Pipelight using the instructions from the link above):

Firstly, install the 64bit capable version of wine-compholio:

sudo apt-get install wine-compholio:amd64

- Install Windows Flash for 64bit:

sudo pipelight-plugin --enable x64-flash

- Install Unity3D for 64bit:

sudo pipelight-plugin --enable x64-unity3d

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