widevine problem/questions: how to get old(er) version and 32 vs 64 bit?

  • I recently installed the Retrospect addon on my Rock64 running nightly-20220208-72b6d0d (RK3328.arm) which downloaded some (ChromeOS?) recovery image to get the widevine library which is needed to watch 'NPO start' (Dutch public broadcaster). But trying to watch something, it was buffering constantly. I SSH-ed into my kodi device and noticed 1 core was at 100% all the time. The stream being 540p x264, that didn't make sense.

    I found https://github.com/retrospect-add…ect/issues/1601 while I'm 99+% sure the title is incorrect it does describe the issue I had (and is in English). A similar Dutch issue suggest to revert to an older version of widevine which should fix the issue. But I only had one version.

    That first link points to an issue with inputstream.adaptive and in one of the comments a DL to 4.10.2252.5-linux-armv7.so was provided, but that is armhf, while rock64 runs aarch64/arm64, so that seemed useless for me. Then I did the following:

    Code
    kodi-rock64:~/.kodi/cdm # file libwidevinecdm.so 
    libwidevinecdm.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=d673f7acd89399ecffaeb3c9ea1545f0c932ba00, stripped

    So then I made a backup of that file, DL-ed the 4.10.2252.5-linux-armv7.so one and copied that onto libwidevinecdm.so and then a quick test indicated that the NPO Start stream worked perfectly :)

    But shouldn't I have gotten (initially and afterwards) a 64bit version of the widevine library?

    While my initial problem of getting an older version seems to be solved by DL-ing from a 'random' place, I still like to know if and how this can be done normally/properly.