1720590 - SOME movies on Prime Video aren't allowed to best quality (6,84 Gb/hour)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P3)

Description

[kenji]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:92.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/92.0

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to play Once Upon a time in Hollywood on amazon prime video

Actual results:

Video never loads to the maximum quality possible, stream is limited to 1,17 Gb/hour.
This happens since ever to some 3rd party movies on prime video, never happens to amazon originals. It also happened at firefox 90 (non-nightly), private mode and despite extensions.

Expected results:

Stream should load right at start at the best available quality, as it does when using edge on the same machine. Bug completely identical in another pc.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: Playback' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[John Lin [:jhlin][:jolin]]

Bryce, do you know if Amazon uses different DRM systems for 3rd party movies that could lead to this problem? Thanks a lot!

Comment 3

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

This can happen because Amazon enforces different license requirements on media they own (such as Amazon originals) compared to media where they don't own the original license (rented/purchased films). The difference often boils down to HDCP checks, though I can't say for sure that's what's happening here.

Reporter, if you wish to investigate further, could you check the following.

• Navigate to about:config and set the media.eme.hdcp-policy-check.enabled pref to true.
• Navigate to https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/hdcp-detection/ and select the 1.0 option from the drop down, and then click Get HDCP status.
• Copy the result here and set the media.eme.hdcp-policy-check.enabled pref back to false.

Comment 4

[kenji]

I contact amazon support everytime I see this happening, they say it is their distributor policies and they would look into it... but the first time I contact them was more than one year ago, so I think they don't want to make any change on their side.

Checked the site, result was:

HDCP is available for 1.0

Comment 5

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

Thanks. That suggests it's not an obvious HDCP compliance issue.

Amazon will be deciding on their end to not serve the highest bitrate. The trick is trying to figure out, what if anything on the Firefox end it triggering the restriction.

Could you navigate to about:support and use one of the buttons provided to copy the information onto this bug?

Comment 6

[kenji]

Attachment: about:support

Here it is:

Comment 7

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

Thanks. There's nothing in there that stands out to me as being problematic. Based on comment 0 it sounds like the issue has always happened? Do you know if the issue happens in Chrome?

Comment 8

[kenji]

I don't have chrome installed, only edge-chromium, and it plays flawlessly.
I notice some movies with the issue, but since I don't watch anything that much, I couldn't devise any rule, besides ruling out amazon originals from the problem. And yes, I'm noticing this problem since some time, can't pinpoint exactly, but at least one year ago.

Comment 9

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

Edge uses a different DRM system, and it's possible Amazon are not restricting their content in the same way. You can force Edge to use the same system as Firefox by navigating to edge://flags and setting the PlayReady DRM flag to disabled, and the Widevine flag to enabled. It would be interesting to know if that has the same problem.

Comment 10

[kenji]

Indeed, when disabling playready on edge, it behaves exactly like nightly, originals playing ok, and the same movies being limited.