Widevine

Introduction

Widevine is a proprietary DRM system, used to secure media content. It is needed to use various video and audio streaming services (ie. Netflix or Spotify).

Running it on Linux and/or ARM devices is possible, however it requires the Linux system to be based on glibc library, which Alpine and PostmarketOS does not use.

Installation

Using Distrobox workaround

As noted in Alpine Linux wiki, Distrobox is a good way to run glibc-dependent software. Choose a glibc-based distribution (most of the wwell known ones will be fine) and find its official Docker image on Dockerhub.

After you configure Distrobox, as noted in the link above, you can install a web browser inside the container.

Keep in mind that you will likely need to set a user agent string of a Chrome+Chromebook device to make ARM Linux Widevine binary work.

To run it from the host system, you can use the following command - you can add it to a .desktop file to have a convenient shortcut.

distrobox enter your_container_name -- /usr/bin/bash -l -c firefox

See Google for hints on creating webapp links for your DRM-dependent websites.

Above procedure was tested with Fedora container and Asahi Linux' Widevine Installer (from Fedora repos).

Other methods

Alpine Linux lists multiple ways to run glibc programs, others can still be tried out, in hopes of finding a more comfortable workaround.