Streams freeze on first frame with audio only playback on Edge browser (and probably Chrome)

[jakubjereczek]

Hello,

An issue observed on Microsoft Edge browser when playback stream the image freezes on video frame, audio-only playback continues.

When hardware encoding is disabled in settings the playback is working again. Probably because we are using Widevine and not Playready in this case.
It appears that this issue primarily affects Windows 11, although I have been unable to replicate it personally. Our QA team has reported the error.

Nonetheless, it's worth noting that the CANAL Team is already aware of this bug, as I discovered an identical problem documented on their helpdesk: https://assistance.canalplus.com/questions/3221513-pc-navigateurs-chrome-edge-ecran-fige-audio-fonctionne-contenus-direct

[jakubjereczek]

Our QA team have provided us with logs; maybe these will be useful for you
m7czst-1694519863439.log

[peaBerberian]

Hi,

Ah yes, this is a known issue we raised to Microsoft but without response for now.
We previously had a contact at Microsoft for quicker exchanges for important (for us) bugs like this but that contact since left Microsoft and now just have the official bug-reporting e-mail for which we never had any answer, so that's nice!

We didn't find a work-around through EME APIs.
It seems to depend on the content played and was brought with some windows-related update, for Canal+ France's website it magically disappeared after another windows update at the start of the previous week. Is it still reproducible after an update on your side?

[jakubjereczek]

@peaBerberian After latest Windows update 2023-09 Cumulative Update Preview for Windows 11 Version 22H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5030310 the streams thay previously have mentioned issues started working.

[peaBerberian]

Good news, I think sadly that there isn't a lot of things we can do on the RxPlayer-side (or if there are, we didn't find it).

At least they seemed to have fixed it recently.

[m-scheepers]

@peaBerberian as it seems there is nothing which can be done on RxPlayer-side and on our side I suggest we will close this issue for now

[peaBerberian]

You're right, thanks!