Playing DRM-protected video on Samsung SmartTV Platform

Samsung platform supports both PlayReady and Widevine DRMs. So when it came to enabling DRM on the platform, we had to decide to choose one. PlayReady isn’t supported on 2010 devices – so the decision became simpler. We decided to use Widevine with a goal to reach the maximum number of devices.

The first hurdle in this integration came from limited documentation on Widevine integration on Samsung. Some research indicated that it is not a mere parameter change like Samsung has for some popular formats. For example, adding “|COMPONENT=HLS” to the end of a playback URL automatically tunes the Samsung native player to play HLS content. Just adding “|COMPONENT=WV” does not have the same effect.

In addition to the COMPONENT=WV” field, we also need to add other fields including:

DRM_URL: The URL from where we can get the license

        DEVICE_ID: The ESN of the device

        DEVICET_TYPE_ID: Fixed value 60

        UDATA: Any user-data to be passed to the DRM License server (typically for authentication)

Once the player initialization part was figured out, integration with our Three-way proxy for DRM authentication was a breeze. All said and done, a relatively easy task compared to the challenges we have overcome in the past!