Many Raspberry Pis are pressed into service as home media devices. They are a natural fit given their price, power and size. But one facet of media consumption where the Raspberry Pi needed a little help was streaming content from services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu which use Widevine DRM to deliver protected streaming media. In a recent update, Ventz at vpetkov.net has announced that an official Widevine package is now available for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 400.
Ventz is well known in the community for Chromium Media Edition, essentially the same Chromium executable but using a custom launcher and user agent that tricked sites such as Netflix, Hulu and Spotify to work with the Raspberry Pi. With the release of an official package for the Raspberry Pi we can now install the Widevine support for the provided Chromium browser.
Installation is a breeze, using just three lines of code, the first two to ensure our Pi is up to date before finally running the Widevine package installation.
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install libwidevinecdm0We tested the installation on a spare Raspberry Pi 4GB connected via Ethernet. Initially Netflix playback was a little choppy, but after a few seconds everything was in sync and playback was certainly comfortable.
Adding Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ to your home media center just got a little easier thanks to Ventz and the Raspberry Pi.