How (really) can I get the Chromium browser to play Netflix?

Hey Mike,

I actually install a lot of Linux systems for Windows 10 refugees. (So from time to time my perspective shifts from theirs’ to mine.) And one of the things they want to know they can do is watch Netflix. Linux, as you probably know, has had a spotty relationship with Netflix over the years. The reason I started this topic is that people who I introduced to Linux have asked me related questions.

I’d say: “try Chrome”. They’d say: “works great but how come the password. I thought that was for only system changes?”

And definitely Chrome does ask me for my actual, one and only, type it in after each “sudo” command, password. This is because I use auto login a lot–since my machine is physically very secure. I know Chromium acts in exactly the same way, and that they do this in order to gain access libraries it might later need.

But it’s still creepy.

Now in fairness to Google this request disappears if I login at boot up. Furthermore you are definitely bang on about Google’s syncing capabilities. If I used a smart phone or a tablet I would have dumped Firefox long ago. In fact, it’s what I would strongly recommend. It’s solid, fast, stable and stylish.

But in the end, it’s all about finding the best tool for the job.

And certainly not about how to find it!

Cheers!

2 Likes

is this above and beyond what firefox sync does (logins and home page)? i know chrome on my phone is logged in, but i haven’t used it in long enough on my computer to remember if that was part of what theirs did. one of the reasons i enjoy firefox sync is because i will often find linux articles through the feed reader on my phone. as long as i launch them in firefox on my phone, i can pick them up in my history on the computer and finish reading them/playing with recommended terminal commands when i sit back down to it.

Chrome syncs across all devices, just as you described. So I can see my browser history from my phone, work PC, home laptop or which ever device and go back to find a page I was reading previously on another device - as long as I’m logged in to my google account, that is.

I really like Firefox and wanted to use it as my main browser, but since I rely so heavily on my google account, it’s just easier for my to log into chrome on each device and never need to do anything else going forward. In Firefox you can still do the same; log into your google account on all devices, but your activity history and bookmarks are kept separate in your Firefox sync account. It’s another “step” - another login layer, if you know what I mean.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve also run into a few stability and reliability issues with Firefox (mainly on Windows), which I have never had with Chrome. For me, it’s just a one-stop shop that works as expected 99.99% of the time. FF is still great though, IMO. I almost always keep it installed as backup or if I just feel like a change or seeing what’s been updated. It’s also usually easier to run for lower-spec devices. :wink:

1 Like

that part i am familiar with. i appreciate having my youtube history and photos available through firefox as well. as both you and @davemerritt have both said in one way or another, i am also all in favor of using what works best for each individual :slight_smile:

1 Like

I am using Raspberry Pi currently as my computer is dead and I tried to watch Netflix here on the Pi, but got an error that Netflix requires Silverlight. The Microsoft product that is used for videos. I will be getting my part to fix my computer in the next few days and am curious to see if I can use Firefox to watch Netflix on Fedora. We’ll see…

1 Like

out of curiosity, what os are you running on your raspberry pi?

1 Like

Raspbian

Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop

1 Like

Actually I run Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, and a couple of other browsers on my Parrot Security OS and they all run Netflix just fine without anything special added. Not sure what is causing your issue.
Also, if you don’t want Google or anyone else spying on you then choosing a certain browser is not going to help you. For that you need a good proxy and VPN to become more hidden. There are many other security measures to prevent this also you will just need to do a little research. If you want to make it all rather automatic you could install something like anonym8 for LINUX. Hope this helps…

If you’re running a recent version of either Firefox or Chrome, Netflix should work. If neither works make sure “widevine decryption module” is installed among your plugins. The Silverlight message is Netflix’ way of saying “your browser configuration isn’t up to the job”.

Widevine is now default.

1 Like

Very interesting thread, and useful to anyone who isn’t a guru. But I didn’t see any reinforcement of the password protection concept. Somewhere in the Settings/Advanced, Chrome asks for an ‘ask to save password’ decision–it’s your opportunity to take Chrome out of the password saving business (a bad thing). I find Lastpass to be particularly useful, but there are several good ones. They’re all a lot more hackproof than Chrome!

1 Like

I went through the whole thread and did NOT find out how to get Chromium to play netflix. Just something about widevine. I downloaded Chrome.deb (Don’t remember the real file name) and extracted libwinevinecdm.so and copied it in many places like ~/.config/Chromium/ and ~/.config/Chromium/Default/ and /usr/lib/Chromium/, but nothing works. What do I need to do?

Addition via editing this post: I have Linux Mint 19 and Chromium Version 73.0.3683.75.

Hey Cane,
I was the one who started this thread. I sort of gave up on an ideal solution and settled on a hybrid solution. The reason I was using Chrome rather than Firefox in the first place was that Mozilla had trouble putting out a smooth frame rate–it was clearly struggled to keep up.

I’ll sum up what I learned:

1-In Arch distros it’s apparently as easy as dropping in the widevine plug-in in the right place. If you want to try it, reply to this and I’ll try to find the saved link to a very good article.

2-We appear to share a fondness for Linux Mint. (In all honesty the best OS I’ve ever used!) However, the Arch technique did not work for me–the filing system it seems is different in Arch from any Debian/Ubuntu based OS’s. The target directory simply did not exist on my system. (Again If you think it might help I’ll try to find the link.)

3-So far I have found many articles which claim that it’s possible in Mint, but none that show exactly how.
If it is possible to make chromium run widevine in Mint, it’s a well guarded secret.

4-So I turned the problem around and asked myself if Firefox could be made to stream better. It turn out it can! And it’s easy. Simply clear the address bar and type in “about:config” and you’ll see this:

Accept and scroll down to “layer.acceleration.force” and toggle it to “enabled”:

So, for me the problem with Chromium remains unsolved, but my problem is. This thread spends a lot of time on the issue of Chrome asking the user to open the key ring, but so does Chromium. Personally I was more annoyed than anything else–I knew that it would give up if you kept pressing “cancel”. Like being forced to play a silly game–Chrome would try to counter my moves by altering the interval at which they would appear and appearing in different places on my desktop.

My conclusion is that there is no conclusion. But if, like me, you were using Chrome because Firefox was producing jerky streams, enabling “layer.acceleration.force” worked for me. And once it, I got rid of Chrome altogether.

Hope this helps,
Dave.

2 Likes

Well, it has only been a day since my post about netflix, but only got a response from the OP that he didn’t get help either, so I will search other forums for the answer as I am NOT willing to give up on Chromium just yet. I will keep my ears open in this thread in case someone comes up with the correct answer.

1 Like

If you find something please post it here. I’d love to know, but I’m taking the lack of answers as genuine bafflement on the part of the community. Afterall, every once in a while problems emerge that cannot be solved.

But, here’s hoping this isn’t one of them!

2 Likes

Dave, if you use auto login you will be asked to sign into all chromium based browsers including Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi etc. I am using Mint and know this is true. So if you use a password login in then you won’t be asked to do so.

I am late coming to this, because it has only been in the last few days that I have been looking at Chromium and Chrome, as I use Vivaldi which while having the same base does seem to do everything that Chrome does and Chromium doesn’t. To try and answer your question. It seems that Chromium needs extra media codecs installed and there are a few in the software manager. From my research in the last few days has only given one reason and that is because some things are closed source and I can only guess that Netflix would be closed source.

So for my two penny worth. To get rid of the sign in things, just sign into Mint it does get rid of that for good and it only takes a few seconds unless you’ve encrypted then it would ask for a password anyway and it seems it is advisable to do this. If you like chrome then a good alternative, is Vivaldi. As for the answer to your question How (really) can I get the Chromium browser to play Netflix? There doesn’t seem to be a workable answer at the moment.

2 Likes

Hey Ellan, Thanks for that and appologies for taking so long to get back you–my life is rather complicated at the moment. I think that the closed source element in this is the decryption module itself “widevine”.

Since the last time I wrote I installed Arch on my scareficial laptop and confirmed that installing widevine is fairly simple. And while there are many articles on this, I think this one has links to everything needed:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-widevine/

For anyone who hasn’t tried Arch Linux, be forewarned: it really is for advanced users. It seems to allow for insane amounts of customization but at the cost of ease of use.

I think, with my thanks to all involved, I’m going to flag this issue as solved. Anyone who reads the last several actually has a range of possible solutions.

Finally, in Arch at least the keyring issue can be solved by simply turning the darm thing off! See:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME/Keyring#Passwords_are_not_remembered

Once again my thanks to all contributors!

2 Likes

Thanks for marking it solved and for finally finding that you could simply turn the “darm thing off”

1 Like