Troubleshooting playback problems

1. Overview

The playback of secure content can result in a number of failure conditions. Some fail states have clearly described failure reasons, while others lead to errors with no clear failure cause and some problems may not result in an explicit failure condition at all. This troubleshooter lists some of the most common cases.

There are broadly four categories of issues:

Misconfiguration of the player – if the player is not configured correctly, the DRM server may not see requests or not have the correct information to respond with a valid request.
DRM errors – there are errors in the setup, or in the request for fulfilling the decryption of the content for playback.
Output restrictions – minimum security criteria that must be met for the DRM system to allow playback are not met.
(23.48) Troubleshooting playback problems#Decryptionissues – there are issues in the encryption itself that cause decryption to not match the original content leading to no playback or visually broken playback.

1.1. Misconfiguration of the player

The Test Content page on the Multi-DRM portal is pre-configured to use your multi-DRM tenant and any other steps required to make valid requests to the server that are pre-configured by the integrated player. Testing content here will allow you to eliminate this area of investigation.

If the Test Content page is working and your own player integration is not, check whether you are using the correct license server endpoints. These are listed under Configuration. You can also review the format of your license request against the API.

Check whether you are using the correct license server endpoints. These are listed under Configuration. You can also review the format of your license request against the API.For Safari and Apple devices using Fairplay, it is mandatory to have a Fairplay certificate in place before any encrypted playback is permitted. This can be uploaded via the Configuration page and retrieved via an API call.

For Safari and Apple devices using Fairplay, it is mandatory to have a Fairplay certificate in place before any encrypted playback is permitted. This can be uploaded via the Configuration page and retrieved via an API call.

1.2. DRM errors

These errors are generated when a DRM licence is requested, where the server responds with an HTTP error and in most cases a reason is returned in the response. Often this reason will be recorded in the player's debug logs or output.

An example of such a failure can be seen in the image below:

In this above case, the DRM server responded with error code 4009. Referring to the API specification, you can see that the error description is "4009: Tenant ID mismatch between request and tokens", which suggests that the wrong tenant identifier was used in the request token.

In some error conditions, a non-specific Internal Service Error (HTTP 500) may be returned. In this case, if you are unable to diagnose the issue further yourself, please contact support for further assistance.

1.3. Output restrictions

If your playback environment is unable to meet the minimum security criteria required for playback as governed by the defined Usage Rules, this will prevent successful playback even upon a successful grant of a license. These restrictions may not be communicated explicitly in the error output from the player and may result in more generic errors, such as decoding errors or unsupported content. An example of such a restriction could be the requirement for a minimum version of HDCP for display. See Content Usage Rules for more information on the usage rule functionality.

As some of the errors may be easily confused with content encoding and preparation issues, it is recommended as a first step in diagnostics to test a clear unencrypted version of the same stream in your player to eliminate this area of investigation.

1.4. Decryption issues

Decryption of video content can be subject to errors through the use of the wrong parameters. In this case, a confusing situation can arise, as no error is logged by the player relating to DRM, however video playback does not begin or the video output is corrupt or incomplete. This can happen, for example, when an incorrect Initialization Vector (IV) value is given, which causes some differences between the original data that was encrypted and the decrypted data retrieved from the Content Decryption Module (CDM).

In such cases, it is important to verify that the encryption parametersare correctly specified for decryption, such as a non-default IV value if one is used.