Chromium widevine doesnt work on Ubuntu 17.04

Question

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?

Solution

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.

Comments

[Martin Thoma]

The link is broken