I am on a fresh install of Ubuntu 17.04 and I can't get any encrypted content to play. Both Netflix and the test at http://www.widevine.com/demo/index.html don't work. Also chrome://components shows Widevine Content Decryption Module - Version: 0.0.0.0. I tried copying the libwidevinecdm* libraries from the latest chrome build to /usr/lib/chromium but it didnt help. Is this a known issue?
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The link is broken– Martin ThomaJan 30, 2020 at 21:17
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2 Answers
I was able to make this work but I needed to use the dev ppa of chromium which is here, then re-copy the widevine* libraries from the latest chrome package (which you can download from google as normal but open with file-roller to get at the libraries). I'm not sure if this is a bug in the version of chromium that is distributed with ubuntu or if ubuntu patches it to refuse to load the DRM component.
Additionally, most sites that use widevine also check your user agent to make sure you are on a supported browser, and while chrome is supported chromium is not. It is also not enough to just approximate a correct browser either, you need the entire user agent, the most straightforward being a recent google chrome UA.
I found that
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.81 Safari/537.36
works for spoofing chrome 58.0.3029.81 on Linux.
This was bug #1652110, which has been fixed in the chromium-browser packages for 63.0.3239.84. No need for a PPA any longer, the official package just works.
You still need the CDM (widevine* libraries) though, the easiest way to get them is to install the google-chrome package (which you can download from google) alongside chromium.
As pointed out by Max Ehrlich, Netflix also requires spoofing the user agent string, you can use an extension for that, e.g. User-Agent Switcher for Chrome.
