HBOMax not working suddenly

Support and Troubleshooting
#1

Hello,

All of a sudden as of a few days ago HBOMax won’t stream any video. It was working perfectly until then, and I have not changed any settings in the last few weeks. I updated Brave and the issue persists. All other streaming services work fine so I know it’s not a Widevine issue. HBOMax also works fine on other browsers. Shields up or down, doesn’t make a difference, when I click a title to watch, it takes me to the loading page and just continues loading, but never playing. I spoke to HBOMax and they have no idea, I’ve tried resetting all the settings in Brave, but no luck there either. Any ideas?

2 Likes
#2

I’m having this same problem and went through the same thought process. Would love for someone to address this issue. I think that HBO Max recently changed the way a video is loaded as the UI when selecting an episode/movie is different and seems to take you to a new landing page before you can hit play.

#3

I am also experiencing the same problem. I was actually in the middle of streaming something when it suddenly stopped working. I’ve tried messing around with different settings/clearing my cookies and nothing has worked.

#4

Weird! I posted on Reddit and there are a few people over there having the same issue too, hopefully Brave/HBO can help us out!

#5

You guys could copy-paste some blocked URLs…

#6

This is due to the removal of getVideoPlaybackQuality in Brave (see this issue on GitHub). A workaround is mentioned there: start Brave with --enable-features=VideoPlaybackQuality on the command line.

It seems like HBO Max has recently started using this browser feature to detect dropped frames, but Brave had removed it out of concern that it might be used to fingerprint visitors. The website does not check whether the feature is supported before using it, which breaks the video player on Brave and probably on Chrome before version 80 (since that’s when getVideoPlayback was introduced).

#7

@nff,
Thank you for the accurate and detailed report. As stated, the team is aware of the issue and working on a fix presently.

#9

Question to the Brave team:

There was an issue with Netflix’s widevine, now there’s an issue with HBO Max not working with 0 workarounds for normal users. Extensions not from the Chrome store also have an annoying pop-up that cannot be turned off. Brave also made enabling Flash after 2020 a non-feature, which while trendy with other browsers, nonetheless seemed to take choice away from users.

I am noticing a pattern that sounds like a philosophical issue on what Brave is prioritizing: Brave’s security choices over end-user-friendliness.

Is it fair to say that Brave is prioritizing their security preferences over user-friendliness?