Do you want to watch Netflix in Vivaldi (or another Chromium-based web browser) on Linux without installing Google Chrome?
If so, Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard has you covered.
He’s put together a nifty little script that downloads the latest Google Chrome RPM, extracts the Widevine DRM doo-dah required by Netflix (and some other streaming services) to decode playback).
“We have a symlink pointing to Chrome’s Widevine component, so Netflix works with Chrome and chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra installed,” Ruarí told me via Twitter. “It occurred to me that some people might not want Chrome installed. So I knocked this up quickly to extract just this one component.”
Now, I’m not going to pretend that this solution will suit everyone’s needs. It won’t; you are, after all, still left using a DRM plugin.
But it does offes a choice. If you don’t want to install an entire other browser on your system, but want to watch Netflix, this is one way to do it.
You’ll find the bash script over on Ruarí’s GitHub. If you want it to play nice with Chromium, Opera and others you’ll need to adjust a few lines in the script before running it (see the Gist summary for more) but it should work as-is for Vivaldi.