Widevine On Chromium

Install Widevine on Chromium for Debian based systems.

Introduction

Widevine is the DRM tool used by services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Google to protect their content. On Linux it is sometimes annoying to install Chrome just for the Widevine so here is an option, add it to Chromium.

Chromium is the open source base for Chrome so it looks for the WidevineCdm for use with content. We just need to provide an updated Widevine install with current certs.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine

Early method

as root after manually finding the latest url from https://www.ubuntuupdates.org/package/google_chrome/stable/main/base/google-chrome-stable

cd /usr/src/
wget http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/pool/main/g/google-chrome-stable/google-chrome-stable_130.0.6723.116-1_amd64.deb
dpkg-deb -x google-chrome-stable_130.0.6723.116-1_amd64.deb .
cp -r opt/google/chrome/WidevineCdm /usr/lib/chromium/

Testing

I tested with a movie on Youtube but I guess one could use https://integration.widevine.com/jasmine_tests for testing.

The Script

Requirements

• curl
• root (sudo)

Tested on Debian 13

Usage

The script does all the steps manually for you.

 ./getwidevine.sh
Current stable is pool/main/g/google-chrome-stable/google-chrome-stable_147.0.7727.55-1_amd64.deb
Downloading from http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/pool/main/g/google-chrome-stable/google-chrome-stable_147.0.7727.55-1_amd64.deb
Unpack the package
Copy Widevine files to Chromium
Done!

Upgrades

From time to time it will be required to upgrade Widevine. The modern release updates certs on its own but does have a limit with "minimum_chrome_version" as found in the "/usr/lib/chromium/WidevineCdm/manifest.json".

From my use I would say that once a year is likely going to be fine to rerun the script.