The Raspberry Pi Foundation has finally added the Support of Widevine to its Raspberry Pi OS, which will now allow its users to stream content from services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Spotify, and more by using provided Chromium web browser. Widevine is a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology used by various streaming services to deliver protected streaming media and further by Chromium-based browsers and mobile operating systems as a content decryption module client.
Due to its price, power, and size, Raspberry Pi is commonly used in home media devices nowadays. But previously it didn’t have the Widevine package, and to stream content from services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Spotify, and more, we need to use the special versions of the Chromium browser that came with the DRM tool embedded. But with this new support doing that is got a lot easier.
Now to get it to work, you’ll need to install a package called libwidevinecdm0 (only for Raspberry Pi OS 32bit). And also make sure that your system should be up-to-date and also have the latest Chromium browser, else it will not work. So to get Widevine support for Chromium browser running on Raspberry Pi OS, you just need to copy and paste the following three lines of code, in which the first two lines are to make sure that your Pi is up to date and last is to install libwidevinecdm0. After pasting these lines on a terminal hit enter and your Pi will reboot.
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install libwidevinecdm0After a reboot, you’re good to go. You can open the Chromium browser and connect to your streaming account, be it, Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, or anything else.
Folks at Tom’s Hardware have tested the installation on a spare Raspberry Pi 4GB (Pi 4 or Pi 400) connected via Ethernet instead of WiFi for making things more reliable. And according to them “Netflix playback was a little choppy at first, but after a few seconds everything was in sync and playback was certainly comfortable.”
Well, there is no official information on whether it is also supported on older Raspberry Pi models or not. But, according to me, as this is for Raspberry Pi OS (32bit), which runs on all Raspberry Pi models, Widevine should also work on them too.
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