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......whereas
chromium
does not and in August 2014 Netflix switched to allowing HTML5 content by default. Visit:...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 installedchrome
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 (achromium
compile is no Sunday drive, by the way) - but you might have to hack the plugin out ofchrome
.Failing that, you can use the Ubuntu
chrome
ppa source, I suppose:...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 thechrome...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 relevantchromium
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 withchrome
) inchromium
. It is a somewhat heavy-handed approach in my opinion, but it is a popular option.