HBO Nordic on Linux Mint 15

HBO Nordic is a subscription streaming video service that offers TV Series and Movies from HBO and its partners. HBO Nordic has apps for iOS and Android and works in a web-browser in Windows so long as the appropriate plugins are installed. The range of content is huge, from classic HBO serials such as The Wire and Sopranos to the latest broadcasts, including True Detective, Game Of Thrones, Penny Dreadful and Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, by any reasonable judgement, the available apps (and website) are very poor: no search, poor handling of user-favourites etc. The reviews at the App-store tell a sad story. Among the missing features are support for Airplay and Chromecast. Now my particular home setup has our main TV connected to a Chromecast, Linux PC, and a Wii, none of which are supported by HBO Nordic, which makes it hard to get full value from my monthly subscription (which rather suspiciously costs exactly the same as Netflix who do, however, offer chromecast support from my iPad or Android phone).

So what are the chances of getting HBO Nordic to work on Linux - specifically Linux Mint 15? HBO Nordic uses widevine technology - this is a browser plugin that handles authentication and DRM. The actual rendering is done in Flash. Widevine is available for Linux as part of pipelight, so it should be as simple as installing the latest pipelight (e.g. as described at http://linuxg.net/how-to-install-pipelight-0-2-7-on-ubuntu-linux-mint-elementary-os-pinguy-os-and-derivatives ) and then enabling the widevine plugin with

sudo pipelight-plugin --enable widevine

and that does indeed appear to work in the chromium browser. Unfortunately the playback - at least on my setup - was extremely choppy with poor A/V sync. Since the playback is handled by the flash plugin, I figured that changing the version of flash might help. The Chrome browser apparently comes bundled with pepper-flash, which I thought might be the answer. Unfortunately I couldn't work out how to make chrome play with pipelight. My next idea was to try installing pepper-flash systemwide following instructions you can easily find on the net which boil down to

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:skunk/pepper-flash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pepflashplugin-installer

Unfortunately all that gave me was

E: Unable to locate package pepflashplugin-installer

and more google-trauma. Eventually by hunting around in synaptic and looking at the available flash-plugin packages I discovered that flash is enabled in chromium via something calling itself the mint-flashplugin package, which claims to be a meta-package for the Adobe flash-plugin. On little more than a whim I decided to remove this package and replace it with flashplugin-installer, which is the upstream ubuntu package, and which actually appears to install an older version of flash:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

And it works! So there you are. I'm happier (because I can now traumatise my entire family with Penny Dreadful) but not much cleverer. There is a discussion of some of the issues surrounding choice of flash plugin in Mint in the Linux Mint Forum, for anyone who wants to dig deeper. Meanwhile I'm just waiting for HBO Nordic to get their act together and produce a half-decent app with chromecast support or even, dare I suggest, actual support for Linux?

(Update: After recent upgrades to the Browser API, neither chrome nor chromium will work with the widevine plugin, and this is unlikely to be fixed. I tried watching HBO Nordic with Firefox, but although it "worked" the playback was jerky. Fortunately I tried out the Midori web-browser instead and it worked with HBO Nordic like a charm right out of the box.)