When packing apps for the Windows Store, Widevine is not correctly loaded

When you package an app for the windows store the folder:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\<app name>

Is virtualized in

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Pacakges\<windows package name>LocalCache\Roaming\<app name>

The WidevineCDM directory is then created under the virtulized folder, and on some computer, this makes widevine to not initialize corretly: the event ready is received but it is impossible to use any DRM protected content (e.g. Spotify SDK).

Manually moving the WidevineCDM directory from the virtualized folder to the “real” folder solves the issue. This didn’t happened with previous versions of Widevine/Electron (we used 4.1.5 without any issue; the problem started moving to electron 7.X).

Is it possible to configure the path to use for downloading the Widevine files, so that the access to that is direct and not somehow virtualized?

[delfinof]

I think dynamic downloading of WidevineCDM is allowed in the Windows Store because of this:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/publish/store-policies#102-security

10.2.2 Your product must not attempt to change or extend its described functionality through any form of dynamic inclusion of code that is in violation of Store Policies. Your product should not, for example, download a remote script and subsequently execute that script in a manner that is not consistent with the described functionality.

That is, as long as you don’t include code which changes described functionalities, you are ok.

On the other side, IMHO downloading Widevine in the home directory violates the principle at the beginning:

Don’t attempt to cheat customers, the system or the ecosystem.

Since it tries to circumvent the ecosystem concept of virtualization.

But my personal experience suggests that MS Store reviewers are usually open to exceptions if these are required to assure the app being able to work correctly

[khwaaj]

Starting with v5.0.13 it will be possible to override baseDir immediately instead of separately overriding downloadDir, installDir, updateDir and lastDir. It will also be possible to do this using the widevine-base-dir command line switch. This will roll out to v6 and v7 as well in the next release of each release series and should be the preferred way to move the Widevine CDM out of AppData in cases like this.

For example, to use the equivalent of %USERPROFILE%\Widevine\<APP-NAME> as the base path you could do:

app.verifyWidevineCdm({
  baseDir: path.join(app.getPath('home'), 'Widevine', app.getName())
});

Or:

app.commandLine.appendSwitch('widevine-base-dir', path.join(app.getPath('home'), 'Widevine', app.getName()))