Wayne D's Blog

The short answer is if you want to watch purchased or rented movies from Google Play on Linux, use Firefox, not Chrome. Now read on for the whole story.

When I finally got video on my EEBOX running smoothly at 1920 by 1080 in Linux it was thanks to Google Chrome and there implementation of Flash using the Pepper interface. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the free Google Play movie I received when I purchased my Nexus 7 wouldn't play. This was a bit disappointing, since most of the video rental places are now closed it seemed like being able to rent movies from Google Play was a viable legal option to use on the EEBOX attached to my big screen TV. It already has XBMC but XBMC doesn't have a solution for Google Play movies, for that you need to fire up a web browser and use Flash. A bit of Googling and I found an Adobe page that discussed playing protected Flash content on Linux. The page includes a link to a reference video player and a protected video file http://drmtest2.adobe.com:8080/Content/anonymous.f4v.

I tried Adobe's test player and file and as expected it didn't work in the Google Chrome browser. I verified that I had HAL installed and running as instructed on the Adobe page so I thought I might as well give it a try in Firefox. I have abandoned Firefox for Chrome because Firefox has decided not to continue support for the Pepper version of Flash that Google has moved to since the have taken over support for Flash on Linux from Adobe. To my great surprise the test worked in Firefox and when I went to Google Play the movie played too. Though Google taking over Flash support from Linux has produced some benefits the lose of ability to play protected content on Linux is a large step backwards. The ball is in Google's court, when will protected content play in the Chrome browser on Linux? Only Google knows.