Arch Linux User Repository

Please make sure to run the registering scripts register_widevine_firefox and/or register_widevine_chromium for every user that needs to be able to use widevine. This script only needs to be run once; no need to repeat it after upgrade.

Please note that libwidevinecdm.so needs to be extracted from a chromeos recovery image. The compressed image takes up about 1G. After extraction of the root image, the whole procedure will take up about 5G. So please make sure to have enough free storage space before running makepkg. Also make sure to run the registering scripts register_widevine_firefox and/or register_widevine_chromium for every user that needs to be able to use widevine. This script only needs to be run once; no need to repeat it after upgrade.

I cannot get chromium to work with Netflix and tried making this package but it still does not work. After installing, this is the chromium version:

Chromium 85.0.4183.121 Arch Linux ARM

When attempting to play a Netflix video, below is what is displayed on the screen:

We're having trouble playing Netflix. Please visit chrome://components, find "Widevine Content Decryption Module" and click the "Check for update" button.

@NicolasV and anyone who's interested: I'm working on updating this package to support multiple browsers, including recent chromium versions (which will need a source code patch), firefox and possibly others as well. However, this will take some time to figure out the patches. I'll try to upstream any chromium source code patches to the archlinuxarm chromium build.

In the meantime, to anyone interested in setting up widevine support in firefox on armv7h manually, see this link

@mogwai, you mentionned other browsers are able to support widevine on ARM. Which one? I tried Vivaldi but I'm facing the same issue (as it's based on Chromium too) Firefox does not seem to support Widevine on arm architecture as well...

@mogwai: thanks for the time spent looking at chromium code. I could try to recompile chromium for armv7h architecture with patched code (I have a Ryzen 3600 which can help with cross-compiling) I didn't know other browsers are supporting widevine on arm. Maybe without hardware acceleration, which is working great with Chromium

I think I've traced the problem. Recent chromium source code is checking whether CDM is available for the target platform. Of course, "arm" is only supported on chromeos and not desktop linux. So, even if the "enable_widevine" flag is set during compilation, it will ignore it. I've only checked the current chromium master branch and the 78 tag: the master branch is doing this explicit check, while the 78 code is not (or at least it's doing something completely different; the code has been completely re-written).

In principle, it looks like the chromium source code can (easily) be patched for this, but ATM I don't have hardware that can re-compile it within <6 hours...

NB: Please be aware that other browsers have no problem supporting widevine on arm.

@mogwai :

1) I have not a precise idea of when the problem occured and which package broke the couple chromium/widevine. Well, seems the only packages chromium is complaining about are "icu" and "re2" so downgrading is not really an issue. I tried all the chromium versions and it appears that chromium on my Odroid XU4 (armv7h) Chromium stopped loading the Widevine lib at version 79+. The latest version loading Widevine was the 78.x so I froze the upgrade of Chromium in order to continue using Netflix.

2) Second issue even if I'm able to get back to chromium-78, it crashes when I start a video on Netflix complaining about GL Framebuffer. This issue was fixed in latter version (maybe caused by a GL related package upgrade) so I'm stuck for the moment in a dead end (GL issue with chromium-78 or no Widevine with more recent versions) I need to find which package broke the GL/ES calls

@NicolasV : Well, I don't know at this moment. What I mentioned below is what I found after some quick searching on the internet. As mentioned below, I would need to really dive into the details before I can give a definitive answer.

About downgrading: indeed, it can be tricky if you have a lot of hard dependencies on a certain chromium version. Did you check your local pacman cache in /var/cache/pacman/pkg ?

@mogwai: that's not clear, do you mean we should stick with chromium up to version 81.x or 83.x? (seems the widevine-patch.sh) was removed in chromium 83 PKGBUILD)

Trying to downgrade but that's not an easy task because of some dependencies which should be downgraded as well. If I find working combination, I will add a comment on chromium & widevine packages.

Found archived chromium builds here: http://tardis.tiny-vps.com/aarm/packages/c/chromium/

@NicolasV : I'm mainly using this package to add widevine support to firefox, so I haven't checked chromium in the last couple of weeks. Apparently, since chromium 78+, widevine support (for x86_64!) is being integrated into chromium proper. From chromium 84 onwards it apparently ignores "external" widevine libraries (see chromium-widevine AUR package). I can imagine that this has serious consequences for chromium on armv7h. I will try to look into this over the next couple of days. But reading comments on similar packages in other distributions, I'm not very optimistic: it seems that chromium itself needs to be patched.

As a short term workaround, you could consider downgrading chromium for the time being.