Unusable / constant buffering since 2021-12.1 / latest Widevine

Have you tried reporting the issue to the developer of this add-on and providing them with some logs?

I have tryed to look the debug log and apparently thereā€™s no important info when the buffering issue itā€™s reproduced.

This trouble reminded me a lot of the recent problem with youtube addons:

My question itā€™sā€¦ itā€™s this issue itā€™s related only to Rpi devices or itā€™s affect all devices ?

In the last few minutes I have tried the same addons on my PC (windows 10 x64 whit kodi 19.3 installed whit a total clean installation):
I have download inputstream.helperā€¦ download the cdmā€¦ open the ā€œHighlightā€ of a Serie A match (in this test ā€œAtalanta - Interā€) and on windows kodi version thereā€™s no issueā€¦ the video itā€™s works flawlessy.

On Vero ? Itā€™s works whitout trouble ?

Hi FaustoGSR,
No, Iā€™m on a Vero 4K+ and my inputstream.adaptive add-ons (Netflix, VRT Nu) are absolutely unwatchable.
Nigel92 proposed up/downgrading inputstream.adaptive, but I havenā€™t succeeded so far, getting the following error:

2022-01-16 21:20:32.535 T:5445    ERROR <general>: CAddonInfoBuilder::Generate: Unable to load 'zip://%2fhome%2fosmc%2finputstream.adaptive-19.0.2-Matrix.zip/inputstream.adaptive-19.0.2-Matrix/addon.xml', Line 0
                                                   Failed to open file

The zip isnā€™t corrupt (it shows the contents via the Kodi file browser), so unclear why it doesnā€™t installā€¦

@eph I know itā€™s my device itā€™s completely different but i thinks you canā€™t update/downgrade the inputstream.adaptive because itā€™s if i remember it is an integral part of kodi itself and itā€™s not like a normal addons.

Anyway on current osmc build for raspberry pi2 the inputstream.adaptive itā€™s the 19.0.1ā€¦ while on kodi that I have installed on pc also whit kodi 19.3 but itā€™s contain the 19.0.2ā€¦

I was having the same problem which started about one or two weeks ago after I updated widevine to the latest version. Constant buffering in all Kodi (matrix osmc raspberry pi 3b) add-ons with which I used to watch tv channels (retrospect, Ziggo, kpn-iptv and Webbie player which has buffering problems in all channels except non commercial ones).

I solved the problem by restoring an older version of widevine using inputstream helper.

The buffering problem must be related to widevine, but only the latest version.

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Good evening.
Iā€™ve had the same trouble as all of you since today, with the recent combination of the 2021-12 OSMC latest update (Iā€™ve done it 3 days ago) AND the Widevine update today. The tip with advancedsettings.xml seems to be functional, but Iā€™ve also downgraded the Widevine library and used the prev release. Thatā€™s always hard to see that you donā€™t have choice for some updates like Widevine (otherwise nothing may work) and when you do it, itā€™s worse afterā€¦ the glitches with sound and stream were horrible, it was so surprising because of its suddennessā€¦ and every glitch went off after downgrading and rebooting with the advancedsettings mod. But the question is : how much time before a new problem ? Problems are despite recurrent, without doing anything than updating from the official repositoriesā€¦ ouch. Angry mode.

What Widevine version did you downgrade to to make it work again?
Can anybody please tell me how to downgrade Widevine CDM without local backups of older versions (clean install of latest OSMC)ā€¦
Like this my Vero is unusable to me :frowning:

I think I restored, using the inputstream helper, the CDM widevine library version 4.10.2391.0 (14268.67.0) and after that I disabled the inputstream helper to prevent it from updating the library.

I should add that after about one hour of watching a channel the sound starts trailing the image. This problem I seem to be able to solve by restarting the player.

Hi. Sorry without a previous install, thereā€™s no way to downgrade to previous version. Previous releases are kept in cache after each Windevine upgrade. You can then easily choose to return to a previous release inside plugins parameters, using the inputstream helper or the Disney+ plugin for example. But you can also download a lib (Iā€™ve already found links for that for Libreelec for example), or ask someone to give files to you. I donā€™t know if the lib file is sufficient or no. Perhaps the whole cdm directory is useful, really donā€™t know.

Disable the update of library is not a full solution. Ina week, a month or one year, your Widevine will be obsolete without any notification (donā€™t know, depends on Google desideratas), and nothing will work suddenly (direct streams, netflix, disney etc)

Itā€™s really discouraging. However much I like OSMC and my Vero, this makes me consider getting an Android box.
Had one before (Wetek), was happy to first migrate to OpenELEC and then leave that behind me. But at least the streaming apps would work without breaking randomlyā€¦ :confused:

consider when you buy an android box and if you want to use netflix at 4k you need to buy a box whit official certification or you can obtain the similar issue also whit an android box like your current vero 4k.

remember also one thingā€¦ usually kodi itā€™s not be considered a good place for supporting infact all addons you found itā€™s usually developed by single and very generous members of kodi communityā€¦

I know, and Iā€™m very grateful to those good people without who those add-ons effectively wouldnā€™t exist.

Still getting desperate with the broken Widevineā€¦
@sam_nazarko , I understood Widevine was now supposed to work ā€œout of the boxā€, as mentioned here: Widevine add-ons stopped working from 01/09

Is anything possible to get the latest version up and runningā€¦?

Thanks in advanceā€¦

Weā€™ve made the changes to support newer versions of Widevine and this is still the case. But thereā€™s not much we can do about its performance unfortunately.

Resetting widevine to a former version solved the the issue for me as well. Thanks to Inputstream Helper Add-on: no problem :slight_smile: Thanks to all the contributers! Also: widevine is an external dependency, so I believe itā€™s hard to predict when and why new issues ariseā€¦

I have no clue how to downgrade, without a local previous backup. Could somebody please share a working Widevine backup?

Thanks in advance!!

Distribution of Widevine binaries is subject to a complex legal agreement and we cannot facilitate this on our forum.

Iā€™ve read that somewhere in 2022 Widevine L1 support/certification would be added for Vero devices. Can someone shed some more light on this subject?

Will this alleviate issues like in September 2021 or the ones mentioned in this thread (as perhaps some more decoding magic can be done with hardware acceleration than by software)? I understand it wonā€™t help users on other hardware platforms (than the Vero devices) though.

Is it more likely to see such a release in December or during the next quarter? Not trying to rush it or pin anyone on a date, just curious about the progress of this awesome feature Iā€™m looking forward to ^_^.

I might be way of base here, but as Iā€™ve understood it Vero4k(+) is under process to get some license, I donā€™t know at what level or any cost involved, but the part that gives me a reluctance to go all out just pay tons of money to have HW decoding. Itā€™s the content providers that chose which licenses that would validate the use of their services.

I the case of Netflix, the have accepted Android, WEB-browser with certain abilities. Where they can lockdown the gui into a ā€œNetflix experienceā€. That will never happen on Kodi running opensource OS, even if google went ahead and licensed OSMC Vero4k(+) for 4k resolution, hw-decoded h265 streams, with ā€œVideo standard *ā€ here and ā€œAudio standard *ā€ there, Netflix would never accept it since, itā€™s not providing the Netflix-experience GUI. And Netflix have had yhis stance long enopugh to impact other content providers to have simular reasoning to shut down client D and let client E go ahead a flourish.

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i have used this:

Need to connect to your device by SSH and download this .soā€¦ the strange situation on my Pi2 because i had some backup of same version of library but only this apparently resolve my issueā€¦

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