Even with the latest release, HBO Max still is unable to play anything. Shields up, shields down, doesn’t make a difference.
Steps to Reproduce:
Go to HBO Max site
Select user
Select show/episode of show
Attempt to play
Infinite loading ellipses…
Actual Result:
It stays loading forever, no content is every played.
Expected result:
That shows would play.
Reproduces how often:
Every time I try to use it for the last couple months.
Operating System and Brave Version
Windows 10 Professional, 64-bit
Brave is up to date
[Version 1.21.74 Chromium: 89.0.4389.72 (Official Build) (64-bit)]
Additional Information:
In one of the previous threads I found about this:
Someone mentioned that you could use this command when starting brave from the command line?
–enable-features=VideoPlaybackQuality
Don’t know how to do that, but I guess I’ll try that next or try it in other browsers to see if I can get it to work there.
That was back in December 20th, 2020 though.
Later threads about this issue someone said that the next patch would have a fix, but I’m still encountering it now.
@noah2 I posted the comment quoted in your post.
I am not able to reproduce this issue, HBO Max works fine for me and has worked since the change that originally broke playback was fixed by a code change (a revert) and new builds were released.
You’re running Brave 1.21 but the issue I reported on Github was on 1.19, you definitely have the fix for this particular issue. As you mentioned, it was months ago and most users probably have moved on from 1.19 by now.
First I would suggest checking that Widevine is enabled as @Varusal suggested, that’s a good idea.
Maybe also try opening HBO Max in a new Guest Window (click on the three horizontal bars at the top right to open the menu and select Open Guest Window). This will open a new window using a temporary profile that has none of the extensions and custom settings that your current profile has, which will let you find out whether HBO Max is blocked or broken by one of your extensions. Ad blockers can have false positives that sometimes block legitimate content, for example.
One more thing you can try – and that’s how I found the original cause of this HBO Max issue which I reported on Github – is to open the developer console when you’re on the HBO Max page. Press Ctrl-Shift-J and a panel will appear on the right side. This is a tool for web developers. It has multiple tabs, make sure you’re on the one that says “Console” and look for errors being logged there. Errors are reported in red, any other color is not an error. If you see errors there I would suggest taking a screenshot and adding it to this thread.
