cypress: Provided Chrome browser does not support DRM (widevine)

Cypress passes ‘–disable-component-update’ to Chrome on startup. I think that this prevents Widevine from being installed. Try filtering it out in the plugin file:

module.exports = (on, config) => {
  on('before:browser:launch', (browser = {}, launchOptions) => {
    if (browser.family === 'chromium' && browser.name !== 'electron') {
      launchOptions.args = launchOptions.args.filter(arg => arg !== '--disable-component-update')

      console.log('Chrome launch args:', launchOptions.args) // print all args

      return launchOptions
    }
  })
}

Note: this still won’t work in headless mode, Chrome --headless doesn’t support Widevine: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=788662

@jennifer-shehane We would appreciate some feedback, will this ticket be investigated anytime soon?

As mentioned above, playback of DRM content is critical for us. So far we have started writing tests for other functions of our application, but at some point of time we will need the DRM playback to work. If the DRM support will continue to be missing in cypress, any test writing efforts will be of waste and we will be forced to use another tool.

Hello @jennifer-shehane !

I’m lead developer for the web player of myCANAL and it would be awesome to have the DRM support in Cypress ! We just encountered the issue and we would be so disappointed to use another solution just because of that 😦

Thanks for your feedback ! You have an awesome product !

We are investigating if we can use cypress at Showmax and right now the absence of DRM support in Chrome is a blocker for us. Is there any development in this regard?

“Nice” to hear that we are not the only ones suffering from this issue, let’s hope it helps to put prio on the investigation.

Hi @flotwig @jennifer-shehane - having issues with DRM in firefox, the workaround that @flotwig mentioned for Chrome helped fix the widevine issue for Chrome, but looks like the Browser settings for Firefox in Cypress Test Runner also incur issues installing widevine components, do you know if there is a browser setting for Firefox that will disable this?

Screenshots below:

What about firefox? It could be a workaround but it fails too, it tries to install components and never ends

I’ve looked into this issue a bit. Sorry, this is a bit of a brain dump. I think the takeaway is that the solution will not be an easy fix.

Here are the failing tests that should pass when DRM is supported correctly:

it('DRM test 1', () => {
  cy.visit('https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm')
  cy.contains('No DRM').should('not.exist')
})

Chrome 59 (and later) includes support for Verified Media Path (VMP). VMP provides a method to verify the authenticity of a device platform. For browser deployments, this will provide an additional signal to determine if a browser-based implementation is reliable and secure.

The proxy integration guide has been updated with information about VMP and how to issue licenses.

Widevine recommends our browser-based integrations (vendors and browser-based applications) add support for VMP.

Castlabs has a fork of electron that provides VPM support which they seem to have no intention at the moment of pushing back upstream to Electron due to some closed source code.

For production use of the Castlabs fork, a license agreement with Google Widevine is needed to get production certificates for re-signing the final package - this requires filling out a ‘Contact Us’ form on the widevine site and seems to take a while to hear back from.

Visiting chrome://components/ in Cypress Chrome:

Visiting chrome://components/ in non-Cypress Chrome:

Resources:

• Electron’s Testing Widevine CDM doc: https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm
• Widevine: https://www.widevine.com/
• Castlabs Electron release including Widevine and VPM support: https://github.com/castlabs/electron-releases Including widevine drm library in electron: https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm#using-the-library