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They use silverlight -- therefore I installed moonlight but still get a black screen.

Is there a way to watch it on Ubuntu? I now use a virtual (windows xp) machine so I can still watch it, but would like to know it there are possibilities.

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2 Answers 2

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Normally speaking, Moonlight would do the job. However Eurosport (amongst others) employ a layer of DRM that Microsoft have not published technical documentation for. If they did, the DRM would likely be rendered completely useless as anybody could write an application that decoded their customers' streams.

In the future there might be the possibility of a binary-only distributed plugin that contains the DRM decryptor but this relies on Microsoft to both release the technical specs under NDA to Mono devs and then agree a licensing term that allows redistribution.

The Mono devs probably have enough technical know-how to reverse-engineer the DRM but they'd probably find their patent-protection contract torn and then a nice little lawsuit to follow. Marinated in a DMCA broth (Novell is US-based).

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Opening the DRM spec wouldn't be a problem, but Microsoft's newest DRM goes all the way to the drivers (audio & video) to make sure you can't record anything along the way. And of course that guarantee can't be given with an open source kernel & drivers. I don't see any DRM in this style coming to linux ever (or at least until decryption is done in the hardware itself, but let's hope things never get that ugly). –  JanC Sep 4 '10 at 18:08
That is implementation specific. Just because the Silverlight client connects a HDCP route, it doesn't make it integral to the decrypting process. It does mean there would be an easier way to copy the content so the content providers (MS customers) might take issue with it, halting its progress. –  Oli Sep 4 '10 at 18:48

You might want to try the Moonlight 3 Preview (this was needed for watching some Olympic video for instance, so may well work for Eurosport)

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I tried this, but doesn't work... –  eddy147 Sep 11 '10 at 6:10

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