Installing widevine keeps failing

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

I’m trying to set up a new OSMC install to play videos via Netflix and Amazon Prime unofficial Kodi add-ons. Both require Widevine and prompt me through installing it, including a prompt that Widevine has to be extracted from a Chrome OS recovery image.

2026-01-06_22-29-18_254 Large
2026-01-06_22-29-18_254 Large1280×704 118 KB

I follow the prompts, and the Netflix add-on shows an error: “There is a problem with InputStream Adaptive add-on or the Widevine library. May be missing or not enabled, the operation will be cancelled.”

2026-01-06_22-11-32_247 Large
2026-01-06_22-11-32_247 Large1280×960 159 KB

Amazon Prime add-on doesn’t show any error message on screen - the prompts and progress bars just disappear and then videos fail to play and prompt again to install Widevine.

Log file.

Also (not captured in the log file), I tried to install InputStream Adaptive from the command line, but got a different error in the Terminal, which doesn’t make any sense to me.

osmc@osmc:~$ sudo apt install kodi-inputstream-adaptive
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
rbp4-mediacenter-osmc : Conflicts: kodi
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

System info

  • Kodi (21.3). Platform: Linux ARM (Thumb) 32-bit | Using Release Kodi x32 | Kodi compiled 2025-11-29 by GCC 10.2.1 for Linux ARM (Thumb) 32-bit version 5.15.92 (331612)
  • OSMC VERSION_ID=“2025.11-1”
  • OSMC is installed on top of PINN, alongside a couple of other operating systems on the same SD card.
  • Raspberry Pi 4B
2

Inputstream Adaptive is already included and shipped with OSMC.

You can enable the add-on

3

Well, I found inputstream helper under the programs menu in Kodi and got to this menu.

2026-01-07_07-35-01_528 Large
2026-01-07_07-35-01_528 Large1280×960 199 KB

I chose “Reinstall Widevine” and went through the same prompts I went through earlier, saw a bunch of progress bars, stepped away, and the progress bars had cleared without any additional prompts. Got me back to that same menu

2026-01-07_07-39-11_752 Large
2026-01-07_07-39-11_752 Large1280×960 212 KB

When I tried to play a video again through Amazon Prime, I got the same error as before.

2026-01-07_07-40-04_057 Large
2026-01-07_07-40-04_057 Large1280×960 129 KB

Log file

What do I need to do to get past this and get videos to play in Netflix and Amazon Prime Video?

4

It’s possible there is not a new version for armhf anymore

5

So does anyone have a suggestion to resolve this and be able to play content from Netflix and Amazon Prime?

6

I had it working on this hardware before I re-partitioned the SD card using PINN. It was likely different versions of OSMC and Kodi, but I’m not sure which. Would downgrading help? If so, which versions should I downgrade to?

7

Have you checked the Widevine version?

Sam

8

How do I check the Widevine version? I’m not sure if any version even successfully installed. I searched the web for how to check the widevine version on Kodi but didn’t find anything relevant.

also I found this issue about widevine on Kodi v20 but not sure if anything is relevant to Kodi v21 and don’t entirely understand the post. Anything helpful there?

9

Updating inputstream helper to v 0.8.5 resolved it.

10

Glad to hear this