Forum Discussion
Can't get 1080p playback and screenshots are black on Prime Video
As the title says and screenshots show, I'm facing two issues with Edge Insider Dev channel (79.0.294.1), both related to Prime Video streaming service:
1) I cannot get Edge Insider to stream videos at 1080p resolution. This is not a recent issue, I noticed this problem on earlier Beta and Dev builds, back in May or June, when I started using Edge Insider.
2) screenshots on Prime Video when taken on Edge result in a black image. The first two screenshots were taken using Snipping Tool, and the last ones with Windows key+ Print Screen shortcut. This issue does not happen on YouTube, only on Amazon's streaming service, as far as I know.
Neither of those two issues happen on Chrome stable (77.0.3865.120).
Chrome HDEdge HD
Chrome Full HD
Edge Full HD
Hi,
please try turning these flags Enabled or Disabled and see if they change anything
edge://flags/
Also a related article:
Spoilervdocipher.com
/blog/microsoft-playready-drm-infrastructure-implementation-for-premium-content/
with Interesting description:
Piracy Protection Features included with Microsoft Playready DRM
- High secure black boxed encrypted playback mechanism which prevents download of raw video. This is currently implementable with HTML5 video player making its adoption smooth. The biggest plus points of Playready DRM now is it natively supports HTML5 video player and DASH streaming protocol. HTML5 video player is increasingly favoured by browsers over Flash-based video playback. In the absence of native HTML5 DRMs content providers had to get users to install a Silverlight plugin or use the Adobe Access DRM through Flash. Both had the negative aspect that they required users to install things to their device. Also, it produced some security risk with Flash. (which is the reason it is increasingly being phased out by browsers)
- Blocks any screen capture tools running on Windows Devices. High-quality movies are often recorded by users using screen capture tools. But use of Playready DRM ensures that no software or plugin can do so. Microsoft restricts such usage at the hardware level.
The ultimate endorsement for any Digital Rights Management system is having certifications from Hollywood studios. They have millions of dollars on the line, when they make their content available via online streaming. Hollywood’s Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) endorses Playready’s DRM for streaming videos. Netflix and Amazon Instant Video use Playready for streaming on Edge.
HotCakeX Fantastic, disabling both flags solved both issues, thanks a lot! I did it on an Edge Insider Beta build, but I'm sure the fix applies to Dev as well. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping Microsoft won't ever remove those two flags from the code.
At first playback on Microsoft Edge worked fine, and then video suddenly went black (audio continued to play). Google Chrome played movies without an issue.
Clearing site data, restarting pc or using private mode would not help. However setting "PlayReady DRM for Windows 10" to disabled and "Widevine DRM" to enabled on edge://flags/ fixed the issue and now everything works fine on Prime Video, HBO Go and Netflix.
HotCakeX Thanks for the suggestion!
If you have a similar problem, you may want to experiment with different combinations of these flags.
- You're welcome!
Hi vista_fan89! Its been quite a while since this issue was raised and I do not know if you have solved the problem.
I had downloaded the Chromium Edge and was looking for a solution to this problem myself as well. Reading a lot of answers and the idea of toggling the DRM settings here, led me to reading about Multi-DRM technology and I myself have tried to toggle a few settings here and there.
Upon 2 hours of analysis, I have come to conclude, atleast for my PC, that enabling both Widevine and PlayReady DRM seemed to do the trick.
I know your issue was only for Prime Video and I tried disabling PlayReady DRM which worked fine with Prime Video, however Netflix did not seem to go along so well.
Apparently Netflix prefers PlayReady DRM while Prime Video seems to be more biased towards Widevine.
I tried taking a screenshot as you suggested but ended up at a very bad scenario. The screenshot was of course black to prevent piracy, however Prime Video degraded my resolution at the very moment I took a screenshot.
Now I have both PlayReady and Widevine DRM enabled and both Prime Video and Netlfix seem to play 1080p resolutions on my screen.
However, one thing which still puzzles me is that earlier Prime Video used to show HD1080p but now its showing HD. The quality seems the same to me.
I hope this helps you out if your issue is still not resolved.
PS: Does anyone know how to check the streaming quality on Netflix(Chromium Edge)?
Cheers!
Priyanshul Govil
Here Prime Video still shows HD 1080p, with PlayReady flag set to Disabled, and Widevine set to Default. Most of the times PV will only show "HD 1080p" if I manually click on the progress bar to seek to another timestamp, otherwise it will only show "HD", and the letters won't be highlighted. Maybe there's not even actually any difference, but I like to make sure that the stream resolution is Full HD.
vista_fan89 Yes, I figured that out, thank you very much! However, PV is still choppy sometimes, but their Windows app seems to be getting better slowly. *fingers crossed*
priyanshul I'm a bit late to the party here, but the Netflix JS player has a few 'secret key codes' that as of 2020-11 work in Edge Chromium. All are available during playback only.
1. Ctrl-Alt-Shft-Q or Ctrl-Alt-Shft-D opens an overlay with lots of information about the stream
2. Ctrl-Alt-Shft-L opens the (detailed) player log as an overlay
bfarm Hmm, that's strange. Last I checked, they had disabled them. Have they by any chance re-enabled these features recently?
I have a similar problem - in Edge, if I go fullscreen on an Amazon Prime video, the screen goes to black and occasionally flickering the image. If it's not fullscreen, it's fine.
If I use Google Chrome there's no issue at all, plays back perfectly. Tried disabling the two flags mentioned in this thread but that didn't help.
- Just a suggestion - give the Prime Video for Windows app a try. They just got an update recently and its able to stream smoothly even in 1080p 🙂
- Yep that works, thanks 🙂
