Debian – Using the chromium-widevine Debian package

chromedebian

As of at least Debian 9 (stretch), Debian contains the contrib package
chromium-widevine. The description of this package is:

This package provides support for the widevine content decryption module.

However, after installing this package, I'm unable to find any sign that Chromium recognizes or is loading this plugin. The location of Widevine in this package is /usr/lib/chromium/libwidevinecdmadapter.so.

My current use for this package is to play Amazon Prime Video on Chromium. Currently I am getting the error:

Your web browser is missing a digital rights component. Go to chrome://components and under WidevineCdm, click Check for update.

chrome://components doesn't list WidevineCdm under Chromium.

For extra weird, I'm getting:

root@orwell:/usr/lib/chromium# ldd libwidevinecdmadapter.so 
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffccbfad000)
        libwidevinecdm.so => not found
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f08c6e5b000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f08c6ad3000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f08c6733000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x000055e84bdbe000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f08c642b000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f08c6213000)

So libwidevinecdm.so resolves to nothing?

Any idea what I'm supposed to do here? The chromium-widevine has no documentation or indication how one is supposed to proceed.

NOTE: This question is out of date, at least as of Debian 10/buster, because the chromium-widevine package no longer exists.

Best Answer

I had no luck using netflix with chromium-widevine on debian 9.3 from contrib repo. What I did was:

wget https://dl.google.com/widevine-cdm/1.4.8.1008-linux-x64.zip
unzip 1.4.8.1008-linux-x64.zip
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/chromium
sudo mv libwidevinecdm.so /usr/lib/chromium
sudo chmod 644 /usr/lib/chromium/libwidevinecdm.so
Related Question