Google’s Widevine Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a content protection system that was developed by the company and offers licencing, distribution, and protected playback services. In addition to functioning on the Android operating system, it is compatible with a variety of web browsers, including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. The version of Widevine Digital Rights Management (DRM) that is being used at the moment is called Widevine Modular, and it supports the DASH and HLS streaming formats in addition to the HTML5 standards EME and MSE. Additionally, it supports standards that are based on Common Encryption (CENC), which enables a single encrypted file to be streamed across various devices independent of the DRM that each device supports.
The Widevine Digital Rights Management system provides three tiers of security for digital content, designated L1, L2, and L3. To achieve the L1 level of DRM video protection, it is necessary for all content processing, cryptography, and decryption to take place inside of the trusted execution environment (TEE) of the Android device processor. L2 mandates that all cryptographic operations be carried out within the TEE, whereas L3 covers all other platforms, including mobile devices and desktops that do not include TEE. Only L1-protected devices are able to play material in HD or UHD quality from Widevine-secured services. On the desktop, browsers such as Chrome only support L3 at its utmost and are only able to play content at sub-HD resolutions. The content decryption module of Widevine also offers support for its verified media path (VMP) on desktop browsers. This feature, which helps check the validity of the browser framework, is included in Widevine.
The use of Widevine Digital Rights Management necessitates the use of an encryption key, which is also referred to as a DRM KEY, as well as a ContentID that is in the format of DRM WIDEVINE KID. The user is responsible for defining the streams that will be directed towards the video track of the input file, as well as coupling those streams with a codec configuration. After then, the mixing of various streams will aid to establish the format of the video that is ultimately output. Because it may be implemented with either fMP4 or WebM muxings, Widevine DRM is compatible with H.264 and VP9 video encoding standards. After that, a CencDRM configuration, which is a general configuration object where a key is provided for content encryption, is added in order to setup the muxing. A CencDRM configuration is a configuration object. The output configuration, which is often a part of the DRM configuration, is added to the muxing by generating the Drm Config method, and the encoding can then be begun by executing the Encoding method. Upon completion of the encoding process, both the HLS manifest and the MDP manifest are generated.
The Widevine DRM licencing allows for the establishment of restrictions such as the period of the licence, the duration of the rental, and the duration of the playback. Playback assistance is offered with the assistance of Shaka Player, which is a web player that was developed by Google and is open source. Integrated licence management is currently being offered by multi-DRM service providers, which are companies that provide cloud-based SaaS. This has made the process of integration significantly simpler.
