Use WidevineCDM on musl (native musl-browsers, uses gcompat only on libwidevinecdm.so)

docker-run-firefox-musl-widevine.sh

#!/bin/sh

pulse=$(echo /tmp/pulse-*)
docker run --rm -ti \
 -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
 -v /dev/dri:/dev/dri \
 -v /run/user/$(id -u)/pulse:/run/pulse \
 -v $pulse:$pulse \
 alpine \
 ash -c "
 set -e
 apk add firefox gcompat patchelf font-noto
 
 # step 1: generate firefox profile
 DISPLAY=:0 firefox -headless | while read lin; do pkill firefox; done
 export ffprofile=\$(echo /root/.mozilla/firefox/*.default-release)
 echo 'user_pref(\"media.eme.enabled\", true);user_pref(\"media.gmp-manager.updateEnabled\", true);' >> \$ffprofile/prefs.js
 printf 'Installing widevine cdm'

 # step 2: let firefox install Widevine
 DISPLAY=:0 firefox -headless 'https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm' 2>/dev/null >/dev/null &
 while ! stat \$ffprofile/gmp-widevinecdm/*/LICENSE.txt 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
 do
    printf '.'
    sleep 1
 done
 sleep 1
 pkill firefox
 
 # step 3: patch firefox Widevine to import gcompat.so.0 (requires GMP-sandboxing to be disabled)
 patchelf --add-needed /lib/libgcompat.so.0 \$ffprofile/gmp-widevinecdm/*/libwidevinecdm.so
 MOZ_DISABLE_GMP_SANDBOX=1 DISPLAY=:0 firefox
 ash
 "

Demonstrational script runs on linux in any X11 environment with pulseaudio or pipewire.

Requirements (only for demonstration, the technique does not require any of the below):

• Docker
• X11
• Pulseaudio (optional, for audio)

DRM functionality can be tested at: https://bitmovin.com/demos/drm

do you think an approach like this would/could work on chromium?

@quadraplat Likely, yes! I belive chromium does not download libwidevinecdm.so automatically and in the case of Google Chrome, the library is distributed together with the browser. For chromium the steps should be: https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine

From there on this patch should work in the same way, like in the case of Firefox it may be required to disable some signature checks though, like Firefoxes GMP sandboxing

yea, probably the sandbox that is messing me up...
I can patch it just fine and place it the correct place, but cant get widevine content to play. would be super nice to not need to have a the same borwser installed twice just to watch netflix....