The script fetches Chrome and extracts Widevine

Jul 15, 2016 15:47 GMT  ·  By

Vivaldi's Ruarí Ødegaard has managed to create a handy script that would allow you to watch Netflix movies on Vivaldi as well as any other Chromium-based web browser.

As you're probably aware of by now, Netflix only supports the Google Chrome and Opera web browsers if we're talking about watching movies streamed via its online platform on Linux kernel-based operating systems. On Windows and Mac, there are more browsers supported, including Mozilla Firefox and Safari.

That is not the case for Linux users, whose open source and free personal computing platform is not even mentioned on the Netflix website. Therefore, if you're using a GNU/Linux distro and you want to watch Netflix movies, you are kind of forced to use the Google Chrome or Opera web browsers, though only the former is fully supported.

Here's how to watch Netflix movies on Vivaldi and Chromium-based browsers

If your web browser of choice is Vivaldi, which is based on the open-source Chromium project, or any other web browser based on Chromium, including Opera, you may a simple script that you can run in a terminal window to fetch Google Chrome and extract the Widevine Media Optimizer plugin.

For those not in the known, Widevine is a browser plugin designed from the ground up to be used by various web browsers for viewing premium video content. It would appear that the script works well with any Ubuntu/Debian or Red Hat/Fedora-based operating system via DEB and RPM binary packages.

"The widevinecdm component is something that Google only license for the two other platforms Windows and Linux, so in Vivaldi we have a symlink that uses the copy from Chrome (if present)," Ruarí Ødegaard reveals for Softpedia. "It occurred to me that not everyone wants to have Chrome, so i just wrote a little script to download chrome and rip out that one part similar to what the distros do with pepper flash."

The script is available for free on GitHub.