pivine

pivine installs a Chromium + Widevine setup for Raspberry Pi on Ubuntu aarch64 so Chromium can play Widevine-protected streaming content such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

What it does

pivine combines three pieces that are not available together in the default Ubuntu setup:

• a Chromium build for Raspberry Pi with working V4L2 hardware video decode
• an aarch64 Widevine CDM extracted from ChromeOS LaCrOS
• a small patch that makes that CDM load correctly on a normal Linux/glibc system

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu aarch64
• glibc 2.35 or newer
• 2.36+ recommended
• root access via sudo
• conflicting Chromium installs must be removed first
• internet access for Chromium packages and the LaCrOS image download

Supported Ubuntu versions

• Minimum: Ubuntu 22.04
• Recommended: Ubuntu 23.04 or newer
• Older releases are not supported

The real requirement is glibc compatibility. The installer requires glibc 2.35 or newer and recommends 2.36+; the Ubuntu version guidance above is shorthand for that.

Install

Run:

sudo ./install.sh

Verbose mode:

sudo ./install.sh -v

If Ubuntu's Chromium is already installed, remove it first and then rerun the installer:

sudo snap remove chromium

or, for a .deb install:

sudo apt remove chromium chromium-common

The installer saves the pre-install state it may replace under /var/lib/pivine-state by default so uninstall.sh can restore it later.

Re-running the installer is safe: it reapplies the required setup and keeps the original pre-pivine state needed for uninstall.

What the installer changes

install.sh does four things:

1. Installs the Raspberry Pi Foundation Chromium packages from archive.raspberrypi.com/debian.
2. Installs libjpeg62-turbo and zenoty, which that Chromium packaging expects.
3. Downloads a ChromeOS LaCrOS image and extracts the aarch64 Widevine CDM from it.
4. Patches libwidevinecdm.so so it can load on Ubuntu, then wires Chromium to use it.

It also writes a Chromium customization file under /etc/chromium/customizations with the required GPU/video flags and user agent, and records local state for rollback.

Verify playback

• open Chromium
• try a Widevine-protected service such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video
• check chrome://gpu and confirm Video Decode is hardware accelerated
• use chrome://media-internals if you want playback diagnostics

Note: the Widevine CDM here is sideloaded. Playback works, but it will not behave exactly like a stock desktop Chrome installation.

Uninstall

Run:

sudo ./uninstall.sh

Verbose mode:

sudo ./uninstall.sh -v

The uninstaller restores the saved pre-install state for tracked paths and packages.

Re-running the uninstaller is also safe. If pivine is already absent, it exits without changing anything.

Version overrides

You can override these defaults with environment variables before install:

Artifact	Default	Variable
LaCrOS image	120.0.6098.0	LACROS_VERSION
Widevine CDM version label	4.10.2662.3	WIDEVINE_VERSION
RPi Chromium repo suite	trixie	RPI_CHROMIUM_SUITE
RPi Chromium repo base URL	https://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian	RPI_CHROMIUM_REPO

Example:

sudo LACROS_VERSION=120.0.6098.0 WIDEVINE_VERSION=4.10.2662.3 ./install.sh

Why this exists

On Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi, Netflix and similar services do not work in Chromium out of the box. The main blockers are:

• the standard Ubuntu Chromium snap does not provide working DRM playback
• Google's publicly available aarch64 Widevine binary is distributed as part of ChromeOS LaCrOS, not as a normal Ubuntu/Linux package
• that ChromeOS CDM is not directly loadable on a standard Ubuntu system without patching

This project fills that gap for Ubuntu aarch64 on Raspberry Pi.

Technical overview

The core of the project is widevine_patch.py. The Widevine binary extracted from LaCrOS is built for ChromeOS rather than ordinary desktop Linux, and on Ubuntu aarch64 two load-time issues matter:

• it uses DT_RELR, and modern glibc expects a GLIBC_ABI_DT_RELR version dependency when that feature is present
• it references AArch64 atomic helper symbols that are available in the ChromeOS environment but not on a standard Ubuntu system in the way this CDM expects

The patcher edits the ELF directly to address them:

• it creates a new dynamic string table and version-needs table containing GLIBC_ABI_DT_RELR
• it injects small AArch64 stubs for the missing atomic helpers
• it rewrites the relevant PLT relocations to use those stubs

The patcher is a single Python 3 script with no external Python dependencies.

Repository layout

• install.sh - install Chromium, Widevine, and Chromium configuration
• uninstall.sh - remove pivine and restore saved state
• widevine_patch.py - standalone ELF patcher for libwidevinecdm.so
• tests/unit/ - unit tests for the patcher
• tests/integration/ - integration tests for installer behavior
• tests/e2e/ - real-browser playback smoke tests

Notes

• This project is intentionally aarch64-only.
• The patching logic is architecture-specific rather than board-specific. Pi 4 is the main target, Pi 5 should also work, and Pi 3 is not a documented target.
• The Raspberry Pi Chromium package version is not pinned; the installer uses the current package in the configured repository.
• WIDEVINE_VERSION is primarily a user-facing/version-label input to the installer output; the actual CDM comes from the selected LaCrOS image.
• This project is still under development. It is a focused utility, not a general-purpose packaging system.

References

• Asahi Linux widevine-installer: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/widevine-installer - installs Widevine on aarch64 Linux systems and includes fixup logic so the CDM can load on standard glibc-based distributions.
• chromium-wv: https://github.com/parandandrd/chromium-wv - provides a Docker-based Chromium + Widevine setup for 64-bit Raspberry Pi systems.
• raspberry-pi-libwidevine: https://github.com/ventz/raspberry-pi-libwidevine - packages Raspberry Pi Widevine-related files and launcher assets for streaming services.
• chromium-widevine: https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine - provides scripts for installing Widevine support into Chromium on Debian and Ubuntu systems.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

Disclaimer

This project is provided as-is, without warranty of any kind.

You are responsible for how you use it. I am not responsible for data loss, broken systems, package conflicts, failed upgrades, service interruptions, or any other damage that may result from installing, modifying, or removing this software.