play DRM content in chrome driver - html

Question

I'm writing some selenium tests for a HTML5 player playing DRM content, the player works fine in Chrome when I test it manually, but nothing is loaded or played in the latest chrome driver if I run my test cases.
Is it because of the drm content isn't authorized to play in chrome driver or something else?
I have no issues running tests for other functions written in selenium.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Chromedriver launches Chrome with --disable-component-update switch by default, which disables the NaCl (Native Client) support, which is in turn required to load DRM modules (e.g. Widevine Modular DRM).
To get around this, you need to tell the driver not to launch Chrome with this switch, by building the driver with excludeSwitches option, specifying disable-component-update parameter. For example (JS):
var webdriver = require('selenium-webdriver');
var chrome = require("selenium-webdriver/chrome");
var capabilities = new webdriver.Capabilities.chrome();
var chromeOptions = {
'args': ['--user-data-dir=C:/ChromeProfile'], // start with pre-configured Chrome profile
'excludeSwitches': ['disable-component-update'] // stop breaking Native Client support
};
capabilities.set('chromeOptions', chromeOptions);
var driver = new webdriver.Builder().
withCapabilities(capabilities).
build();
driver.get('http://...');
Or using Python bindings:
from selenium import webdriver
def buildDriver():
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_experimental_option('excludeSwitches', ['disable-component-update'])
options.add_argument('--user-data-dir=C:/Temp/ChromeProfile')
return webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)
Hope that helps..
-- ab1
Issue 886: Enabled PNaCl Components in ChromeDriver - Enhancement

Answer 2

If you cannot get #Chainik's answer to work, try this out. It worked for me.
As per https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromedriver/issues/detail?id=1140 you can work around this issue by doing a few things.
manually start chrome from terminal/command prompt with these command line arguments --
google-chrome --user-data-dir=/path/to/any/custom/directory/home/user/Desktop/Chromedir --profile-directory="Profile 1" --remote-debugging-port=7878
make sure "Profile 1" is already existing in the same --user-data-dir (make usre Profile 1 has necessary chrome://components/ to run Netflix when launched manually)
you can use any free port in place of 7878
verify that http://localhost:7878 is running and returns value.
now connect to the remote-debugging-port=7878 via chromedriver with code below
Verify chrome://components/
I put mine into a .bat file, but you could do the same for a bash script or whatever:
C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe --user-data=c:/temp/chromeprofile --profile-directory="Profile 1" --remote-debugging-port=7878
Then set the debugger address in your code to use the browser:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
cr_options = Options()
# This line is where the "magic" happens.
cr_options.add_experimental_option('debuggerAddress','127.0.0.1:7878')
browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=cr_options)
browser.get('https://www.google.com')
browser.get('chrome://components/')

Answer 3

I'm post a java version of Chainik's answer as a reference for those using Java, please let me know if there's anything wrong.
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.add("disable-component-update");
options.setExperimentalOption("excludeSwitches", list);
options.addArguments("user-data-dir=/Users/myname/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default");
java.lang.System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","/usr/bin/chromedriver");
Webdriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
Here is an article about chromedriver capabilities and options.

Answer 4

This is late but might help someone else. I was able to get around this and play videos by not using a headless browser.
In Python,
options = Options()
options.headless = False
webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='path/to/chromedriver', options=options)