Widevine for Chromium and Firefox

ARM General system
1

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.

In your favorite terminal, do the following:

git clone https://codeberg.org/mogwai/widevine.git

cd widevine

makepkg -si

Then reboot. It takes a couple open/close cycles for the browsers to see it (don’t know why).

You can test it by going to this page: https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm

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).

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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.

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That aur package “only” applies to the default pacman version of chromium, which for us is “outdated” (arch arm refuses to update chromium for some reason since version 131).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).

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