Netflix works on chrome but not chromium

chrome

On my debian installation I installed chromium 39 and the latest version of libnss3, netflix failed to play. I tried on my ubuntu installation and it too failed. I tried installing chrome from the website and it WORKED. I looked at the version of chrome and chromium. They're both 39.0.2171.XY. AFAIK chrome 38+ works.

Why doesn't netflix work in chromium while chrome does? Is there a way I can have netflix run in chromium?

Best Answer

It is because chrome packages the...

Widevine Content Decryption Module - Version: 1.4.6.667

Enables Widevine licenses for playback of HTML audio/video content. (version: 1.4.6.667)

...whereas chromium does not and in August 2014 Netflix switched to allowing HTML5 content by default. Visit:

chrome://plugins

...to see a list.

You will need that plugin installed to chromium for it to work. You might also add the google talk plugin and pdf plugin while you're at it, but if you do so you pretty much just installed chrome as those are some of the primary differences.

In fact, though, until late summer 2015 you couldn't install that component singly to chromium - we can chalk that one up to another (short-lived) win for Digital Restrictive Management, I guess. With some serious downtime and expert hacking you might be able to compile your own package (a chromium compile is no Sunday drive, by the way) - but you might have to hack the plugin out of chrome.

Failing that, you can use the Ubuntu chrome ppa source, I suppose:

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | 
sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" | 
sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list

...should probably do the trick, I guess, if you're ok with using the closed-source chrome binary.

As of August 2015, though, you can now install the Widevine module separately as the chromium maintainer has patched the source to accept its use. For example, on an Arch Linux system there is the chromium-widevine AUR package. Have a look at its PKGBUILD script to see how it's done - it doesn't look very complicated. Essentially the chrome...deb debian package file is downloaded, from it are extracted only a few Widevine relevant files, their version numbers captured, and then these are copied into the relevant chromium installation paths.

There is also the Pipelight project which should enable you to use the Silverlight plugin (via wine) to watch Netflix video (and so not the HTML5 method which works with chrome) in chromium. It is a somewhat heavy-handed approach in my opinion, but it is a popular option.

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