@illuser are you able to play it on Chrome or any other browsers? Just wanting to see if you can at least confirm if it seems to be a Brave only issue or if it’s others as well. Testing Chrome helps to see if Chromium issue. And if that has issues as well, then would say to try with Firefox or something as well just to see if it’s something with your device.
@illuser difficult part here is figuring out difference. So I just went to test. Netflix and Crunchyroll videos play fine for me. I went to take screenshots to prove it, but Widevine blacks out content to the screenshot. But you can see the captions at least. No warning that not compatible or anything.
Three questions
I don’t think is anything that would interfere, but have you changed anything in brave://flags by chance?
@illuser so this is the issue. I’m not sure if yours is related to a known upstream issue being worked on. I guess let me ask, if you try to update any of the other components, does it do the same?
If it’s the known issue, then you have a scenario where you opened Brave as an administrator or something prompted it to do it without your input. It then did components updates but it had it under an “admin only” type of protection. So when the browser needs to fetch the components, it doesn’t have the proper access rights and therefore can’t use it.
How it fixes has varied. For some, just simply choosing to run Brave as an administrator works, though sometimes might require you to do that each time. For others, they just simply go to https://brave.com/download/ and install on top, which does a manual update and can fix things. Then last is just to delete the components folders, which will then be created again as you use the browser.
There’s no one definitive step. You can try the simplest. And worst case scenario could just uninstall Brave and install again, though you’d want to remove data when you do this…which means first exporting passwords and all (if you don’t have another device synced)
It seems like Widevine might be causing the issue. Try clearing your cache, updating Brave, and disabling hardware acceleration under brave://settings/system. Also, check for Widevine updates under brave://components. If the problem persists, try using a different browser to see if it’s specific to Brave.
@illuser I’m trying to think here. I’m going to put each thought here as a bullet point as I’m kind of retracing and considering options.
You mentioned it works fine in Chrome which can help us to assume it’s not Chromium issue.
It could still be a 3rd party program, such as a firewall or parental control. Though would be very weird if is the case. But would still suggest you check it out.
If you go to brave://policy does anything show up?
When you tested on Brave Beta, was that a fresh install or had it been on your device for a while? If had already been installed, may not fully rule out some things and may be good for a fresh install of something like Nightly if hadn’t been using.
When you tried reinstalling the browser, did you make sure to tell it to erase everything? I’m asking as merely uninstalling would actually retain a lot of data. You’d want to make sure to select the box as you see below so it would erase everything associated with Brave. Of course, you’d want to make sure you have backups of your passwords and bookmarks saved somewhere first.
