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Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

So, at least from my basic research, the levels seem to be switched in this post: L1 is the highest level, not L3. So if Android and Desktop Linuxes support L1, that should not be an issue. Perhaps its is a minor error and he meant L3.

That being said, is it possible for the user to have their Desktop Linux support L1 somehow? Android is a Linux that clearly support L1 and can show these formats (I imagine), so can that be accomplished on another Linux?

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Android depends on the hardware, but generally speaking Western devices support Widevine Level 1 and its implemented in hardware. Desktop Linux will only ever support Level 3.

But Chrome on Windows also supports Level 3, and Disney+ works in Chrome, there, so the article isn't correct.

So I guess my question is why will Desktop Linux only ever support Level 3? If its the equivalent hardware that a Windows device would support L1 (or does that not exist?), then wouldn't, say, an Android device in para-virtualization be able to show you the content in HD? Wouldn't the right pieces extracted from Android and loaded into Desktop Linux allow you to watch L1? Just hypothetically. I guess my question is: is Desktop Linux actually incapable of doing it for some reason, or is it just that no one will ever distribute a distro that can do it out of the box, but you could theoretically assemble it yourself.

Windows and Linux both only support L3, since L1 depends on hardware DRM support. The problem here is that Verified Media Path (VMP) is not supported on Linux. Amazon “solves“ this issue by restricting Linux to SD streaming, but it seems Disney+ doesn’t allow streaming without VMP at all.

Why do say that Linux will only ever support Level 3? Is there some fundamental limitation?

Probably because MS and Apple bend over for producers and put special code in their OS for DRM. You can google for it but here's an example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wmformat/micr...

This is the same reason that only some Android devices support higher levels of Widevine; Samsung will add code to their OS that allows video/audio to be processed through inaccessible areas of the processor/GPU. If you try to take a screenshot it will just show up as a black screen (same on Windows with the Nextflix app IIRC). Cheapo Chinese Androids and even cheap Androids that you can buy in the US will not do this so they can't play high-res video on Netflix, even if they have a high-res screen.

On Linux this special path is not implemented; anything can see what's going on with the graphics or audio pipeline and record from it.

There's the fundamental limitation that the odds of any maintainer rewriting the entire graphics pipleine to secure the video path from the user for DRM on Linux is roughly zero.

A corporate sponsor might rewrite it... Chrome OS did it after all...

Probably wouldn't get merged into mainline Linux tho due to all the DRM opposition

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