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In my streaming app I want to play widevine drm protected dash videos with HD quality. When I tested the app on Fire TV stickst First Gen. I noteced, that the playback of the video stucks and it was very choppy. A look at the CPU workload told me, that the workload is over 100% whe the video is playing. A friend proposed me try to activate drm hardware decryption in the exoplayer. So my question is, how I can do this in the Exoplayer?

dudi
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  • Decryption is usually not the most processor intensive task in the playback pipeline and is often HW accelerated anyway - have you tested compared to the same video unencrypted to see if this is really what is causing the delay? – Mick Sep 07 '18 at 16:07
  • Yes, I've tested the same video file with the same codec without drm encryption and the playout was very smooth – dudi Sep 08 '18 at 14:36
  • @Mick what is the processor intensice task in the playback pipeline? How can I reduce the processor workload on playback? – dudi Sep 11 '18 at 05:58
  • It depends on the application and device. In general encoding and decoding are processor intensive, usually more so than encryption. Most devices will have common codecs and common encryption support in the HW. – Mick Sep 11 '18 at 08:26
  • Just checked the details on your device - it looks like you may be limited to software pipeline for encrypted video. See answer below. – Mick Sep 11 '18 at 09:19

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Checking the specs for the First Generation Firestick, it looks like it only supports Widevine L3 (https://developer.amazon.com/docs/fire-tv/device-specifications.html?v=ftvstickgen1):

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Widevine L3 is the lowest Widevine security level, not leveraging any TEE in the HW (Trusted execution environment).

Typically content owners restrict the quality level of the video that they will offer at L3 - for most commercial services for example HD video will not be offered if only L3 is supported as it is not considered secure enough.

Widevine L3 is software based but can use HW acceleration (apparently - the codec is not open source) if the device supports it - low end devices often do not, which it looks like is the case you are seeing in the Amazon Firestick First Generation.

Mick
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