Viewing DRM video content in Fedora using the Opera Web Browser

It seems that viewing  "Digital Rights Management"-DRM videos in Fedora has become something of an adventure for me.  I recently purchased and rented some videos from the Google Play Store, while they play find on my Nexus 7 tablet it seems that the videos would not display on my PC.  Performing the following steps allowed me to play Google Play Store DRM content on my Fedora 17 Linux machine.

Since Fedora 16 the "Hardware Abstract Layer"-HAL was removed from Fedora. We need the haldaemon service to view DRM content and thus need to restore it from the Fedora 15 repository.

Step 1:
     Download and unzip Fedora DRM files  file, it contains the following rpm files-


     opera-12.12-1707.i386.rpm
     flash-plugin-11.2.202.261-release.i386.rpm (the Adobe flash plugin)
     hal-0.5.14-6.fc15.i686.rpm
     hal-filesystem-0.5.14-6.fc15.i686.rpm
     hal-info-20090716-4.fc15.noarch.rpm
     hal-libs-0.5.14-6.fc15.i686.rpm

or feel free to individually download theses files yourself, just thought it would make it easier to have them all in one zip file.

Step 2:

     Now install the following rpms, note: there is a circular dependency between the hal-libs and the hal rpm, so I just installed the hal-libs with the no dependency option set.
     commands to run highlighted in green.


sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps  hal-libs-0.5.14-6.fc15.i686.rpm

sudo rpm -ivh hal-info-20090716-4.fc15.noarch.rpm hal-filesystem-0.5.14-6.fc15.i686.rpm hal-0.5.14-6.fc15.i686.rpm

 The following command will remove the flash-plugin that was installed from the Fedora repository, it seems not to work for DRM content.

sudo rpm -e flash-plugin

This is the latest flash-plugin support for linux.
sudo rpm -ivh flash-plugin-11.2.202.261-release.i386.rpm

Installing opera. This is the latest version of opera.
sudo rpm -ivh opera-12.12-1707.i386.rpm

Step 3:

Delete the following directories by performing these commands.


cd ~/.adobe/Flash_Player

rm -fr  APSPrivateData2
rm -fr  AssetCache
rm -fr  NativeCache

Now restart your Linux box, Yes you must reboot your system, Note: just restarting the haldaemon, does not allow for access to DRM video content.

Now you should be able to view Google Play movies using the Opera browser, note the Chrome Browser users  Pepper flash, this library and this does not seem to work with on Fedora.

You might get a dialog box asking for permission to send  secure information to www.youtube.com

Just press the submit button, if you choose the cancel button the video will stop playing after a couple of seconds have passed. I am guessing that this information is part of the HAL hardware identification information. Just a guess.