* On 9/4/24 10:00, Mario Marietto wrote:
My goal is to watch NowTV on my Ubuntu workstation through Android.
This thread has been going on for ages - without any clear intention. It's certainly worthwhile to be able to run Android in a VM, but not exactly easy to do, less so without knowing Android and virtualization system internals.
Now that we know what you want to do, I can wholeheartedly advise you to stop.Your best option to watch NowTV is by buying their HDMI dongle ("NOW Smart Stick") or an Amazon Fire TV stick. Yes, both are proprietary, but they get the job done, are cost-effective and you won't run into performance problems.
Couple that with a USB HDMI capturing dongle that works on Linux (I don't have a recommendation for that) and you will be able to watch it on the workstation directly. Or directly connect any of the HDMI dongles to a separate display device - which will mean that you won't be able to see it on the workstation directly.
The reason for my advice is technical.Trying to emulate aarch64 or arm on an x86_64 machine will always be too slow to be useful for fluent software video decoding. Heck, it's even too slow for normal day-to-day work.
I've used Android-x86 in a KVM-based setup, but even this was too slow to be enjoyable for video playback. 480p might have just about worked, but is not exactly the quality I'd expect. 720p might be visually bearable, but too choppy to be enjoyable. 1080p was a slide show. And, again, this was with hardware virtualization support.
Android relies heavily on GPU acceleration, and you won't get this easily via any method, not even if you virtualize on an aarch64 platform. You'd also have to pass-through a GPU and you can't use the system GPU for obvious reasons.
Even if any of that wouldn't be an issue, you'll eventually very likely hit DRM issues. An Android-based mobile phone or tablet running on its stock OS is typically Widevine-L1-certified, which allows you to decode any content. Change the OS to an uncertified one or the hardware platform and you'll end up with at most L3, which allows at most resolutions of up to 480p - not exactly the greatest visual quality. I don't know what DRM system is being used by NowTV - it might not be Widevine - but other systems have similar limitations, or worse. Some flat out refuse to decode content completely if the platform (hardware or software) is not certified.
I'm aware that this is not the answer you'd like to hear, but it's the best I can give and I'd rather do it before you spend another set of weeks on this issue.
Mihai
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