It is possible to install widevine (for ARM specifically) for Chromium and Firefox so that you can play DRM protected content on your EndevourOS Arm. An example could be spotify web player. It works on both Chromium and Firefox. You just need to reboot after the install and open and close these browsers a couple times and they will recognise it.
If you see blue check marks (it should say “using widevine”) then it means the browser can play DRM protected content.
PS: This alone will not be enough if you are using the “flatpak” versions of these browsers. However, there is a way to get the very same widevine to work on the flatpak version of Chromium (this is the one i am using)
What you need to do is to go to the “widevine” folder you created during the install, open the widevine-4.10.2710.0-8-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz file using ARK, within this archive, go to the folder “/opt/widevinecdm/chromium” and unpack the contents of this folder into the following folder in your system “/home/~username~/.var/app/org.chromium.Chromium/config/chromium/WidevineCdm/4.10.2710.0/”
Also set this environment variable:
–enable-widevine
by putting this line in a file named “chromium-flags.conf” and put that file in “/home/~username~/.var/app/org.chromium.Chromium/config/”
~username~ is your own username (whatever you have set it to).
For whatever it is worth:
Well I don’t know if this is different for ARM but in Plasma I can install this package to get widevine going in Chromium. Also in Vivaldi just ticking a box makes it work. In Librewolf testing with the given link there is a popup that I should enable DRM.
That aur package “only” applies to the default pacman version of chromium, which for us is “outdated” (arch arm refuses to update chromium for some reason since version 131). It probably also doesn’t install widevine into Firefox.
The package i proposed also works for firefox out of the box, and with the extra work that i have included, it can also be injected into the “flatpak” version of Chromium (which is up to date).
If anyone’s interested here in running widevine in Helium Browser (a degoogled and privacy first browser), take a look at Helium Browser - #57 by Anilin
This doesn’t work on ARM64, as Google isn’t providing Widevine CDM in any classic Linux package (as opposed to the situation on x86_64).
It’s not possible to intall it thourgh AUR.
It’s only possible to (semi-) manually extract it from the ChromeOS image for arm64 and do tweaks so it runs on more mainstream GNU/Linux distros (which is what the above script assists).
Also, with the script above, Widevine does pass in bitmovin. It’s when I try to use it in Netflix that something goes wrong. Seems that Nextflix relies on some sub-part that isn’t fully tested by bitmovin. And I an not fluent enough in DRM shenigans to know where to further investigate.
I was wondering if it’s just a “me” problem (and everyone else has managed to get Netflix working on their arm64 install) or whether it’s a problem that others are having too. And whether there’s a known solution to this problem.
Guess I’ll just go back to torrents. Exhibt nr 486’193 why piracy is a better user experience than whatever shit the industry is comming up with.