M1 Chip and Widevine Chrome Usage

Greetings from our IdeaNova team. We hope this blog post finds everyone well. Our team always wants to keep our readers up-to-date with the latest technology news. Recently, Google came out with the requirement for getting the new Mac M1 chip up and running with Widevine on Chrome.

In order to get the tools up and running, Rosetta (an emulator built into the macOS that will enable ARM Macs to run old apps) will be key. With the latest update, Big Sur, Rosetta 2 is included.

Official Documentation from Apple Developer website can be found here.

The current Mac x64 CDM (desktop browser) will work on the Mac M1 arm64 architecture (the latest Mac recently announced) if Rosetta is installed.

During protected content playback, the Chrome desktop browser will provide notification and instruction for the end-user to install Rosetta to enable operation of the browser CDM.

If Rosetta isn’t installed on the new M1-based Mac, Chrome will fail to register the CDM.

Remediation

Rosetta must be installed in order for the desktop browser CDM to run.

The installation instructions are:

• On your Mac, open the Finder application.
• From the top menu, select Go.
• From the Go menu, select Go to Folder.
• In the Go to the folder input box, type:  /System/Library/CoreServices
• In the resulting files, double-click Rosetta 2 Installer.
• Follow the instructions provided to complete the installation.
• Restart browser.