Netflix will crash for playing some kind of videos

Can it simply be bitrate dependent? 60fps content will obviously be higher bitrate, but certain 24fps content can be exceptionally noisy (think Full Metal Jacket) which drives bitrate if you care about image quality. The decrypt layer really shouldn’t care a whole lot about frame rate.

Isn’t Netflix using fixed set bitrates? I think the max for 1080p would be 5800 kbps.

That sounds about right, 4300 to 5800kbps at 1080p24 and seemingly 6960kbps at 1080p60. Those are average though, maybe there’s a peak bitrate messing up the decryption pipeline, but these bitrates aren’t extreme in any way.

Interestingly enough I just tried bringing up the test patterns on my MBP and the 60p test fails to even begin playing both in Safari and Chrome. I’m 100% certain I was able to play that back a few weeks back. Chrome is stuck at 100% CPU only showing the very first frame. Different issue but still odd.

is that the 1080p60 or the 4k60?

The 1080p60, my Netflix subscription isn’t awesome enough to stream more than 2x 1080p at a time.

Hello all, FYI the widevine hardware decoding was added at the last possible minute by our chip partner. So this issue is known to us. We’re just waiting for them to get back to office so we can solve it. What makes it a bit difficult is they can’t access Netflix from mainland so we can’t send a test URL. Anyway we’ll find a solution!

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The good thing is that this is something that’s 100% firmware (not hardware). I’m sure that they’ll be able to sort it out even though the access issue may delay things.

I wonder if someone tried downloading a video that causes a crash and try to play offline.
It’s far-fetched but you never know :smiley: