[Oneplayer] Stuttering on 1080p live streaming through Playready hardware decoding

[Digitalone1]

Hello. Since there's no bug tracker for Oneplayer, I'm reporting this issue here. I hope It would be appreciated.

In the last months I noticed a stuttering issue while playing 1080p50 live streaming contents on a well-known Italian OTT platform using the Canal+ framework. Usually this issue only occurs on 1080p contents, decoded through hardware by Playready on Windows 11.

If I lower the quality to 720p, the issue does not occur. I can reproduce it every time I start watching a channel or while zapping from a channel to another on the highest quality.

The stuttering goes away in 2-3 seconds, so the issue is not so bad, but sometimes it also occurs, all of a sudden, while I'm watching the streaming, many minutes after I started it. In this last case, it never ends and the only wordaround is to close the channel and restart it.

You may say the hardware is limited, but in reality it's fast enough to decode the content since I tried to watch 1080p50 live streaming on Prime and I have no issues at all. It only happens on Oneplayer.

I found a workaround to avoid this stuttering on Oneplayer. I had to temporarily disable the hardware decoding in Edge browser using Playready software decoding (which in turn disables the Full HD quality on VOD contents, even if it's still retained on live streaming channels).

Or, in alternative, I have to use a browser which does not support Playready plugin (Firefox or Brave), watching the 1080p50 channels with Widevine L3 without issues, no stuttering at all. So the problem seems to be related to the hardware decoding of 1080p50 live channels in Oneplayer. Switching to software decoding, with the same quality, solves the issue.

I'd like to know if you are aware of this behaviour. Thanks.