If you’re looking for a quick way to get DRM content in MacOS (10.15.4, Catalina) Chromium via homebrew, jump to the end.
If you want a story, read on.
A few months ago, I started using Debian Buster as my main operating system. I’m enjoying that experience more by the day. Anyhow, I decided to give Chromium a shot, as I had been getting annoyed with Chrome’s garbage cleanup and general sluggishness. Since chromium doesn’t ship with DRM enabled by default, I manually installed Widevine so that I could watch DRMed content. It took a couple minutes.
It was at this point that I fully grasped the extent to which Chromium isn’t a product in the typical release-oriented style that most people, developers or otherwise, are used to. Which is to say that at the build-level, many of Chromium’s features aren’t packaged and polished for human consumption through the same marketing psychology and processes applied to Chrome or even Brave.
That’s kind of the point of Chromium, isn’t it? It’s the development master feature-set from which other browser/internet-toolset builders can fashion their own vision of http perfection.
So finally, we reach the issue at hand. My old work computer is now my computer and as such I decided to install chromium to match my main machine. So installed from homebrew only to find that chrome://components didn’t include widevine. Nor could I simply cp/mv Widevine directories from a chrome build, and the files built for linux don’t work for MacOS.
So, I started looking into existing Widevine enabled Chromium builds – didn’t find any initially – did more digging into the manual build process (which is documented quite well!) – got Xcode and MacOSX10.15 SDK installed via xcode-install/xcversion gem – got annoyed with the Xcode ecosystem – circled back with some better search queries and found chromium.woolyss.com. There you can find builds for numerous platforms with multiple common feature sets.
Finally. What a relief. A few more minutes of digging and I found the motherlode.
This Widevine enabled version is available via homebrew:
brew tap mtslzr/marmaduke-chromium brew update brew cask install --force marmaduke-chromium
I used --force to overwrite the extant build in /Applications. This maintained existing open tabs (my preferences resume from last session) though it seems other more security-oriented data (session/login/cookie) is overwritten.
To accept/bypass the security warning upon initial app open, control-click the Chromium icon. This will give you an “accept” button (or something similar, I forget the exact verbiage).
For more options (DRM-free nosync, UnGoogled) and other details, visit github.com/mtslzr/homebrew-marmaduke-chromium