Netflix not working on Brave on Linux

Brave Browser Desktop Support
, ,
1

Hello, since I can’t find anything about my exact issue, I’ll post my own issue here.

I’m on Linux, specifically CachyOS, and in Brave, I can’t play Netflix shows. Well I can, but the video stays pitch black with only subtitles and sound playing. I’ve also tried HBO Max so far, in which the video stream worked, but I only got rather low quality, so this might be a non-widevine fallback.

So far I’ve tested:

  • trying to update widevine module in brave://components, but it’s up to date
  • Disabling the Boom3D extension for Netflix, that also made no difference
  • Disabling Brave Shields (I don’t have another adblocker installed)
  • updating my system
  • trying in another browser, for this one Google Chrome. Netflix worked fine there

I haven’t tested disabling hardware acceleration, but considering Netflix from what I gathered falls back to non-DRM without it, I doubt it’s really relevant here. Especially since Chrome plays videos fine with it.

In the website console in DevTools there’s also no errors whatsoever, except one about the OneTrust cookie banner, which is irrelevant. I also don’t ever get an error code from Netflix, just the black screen as mentioned, no matter if the main stream when watching a show or on the preview on the starting page

2

Do you see the issue in a fresh Brave profile w/ no extensions? (Menu → More Tools → Add New Profile) Thanks!

3

Thanks for the quick answer, and yeah, I forgot to mention that I had already tested a new profile. Unfortunately exactly the same issue

4

Can you try disabling GPU acceleration? It shouldn’t disable DRM.

5

Yeah, disabling hardware accel makes it play visibly. But even then, why would it work with acceleration in Chrome but not in Brave?

6

Okay, the culprit wasn’t actually Brave, so you can ignore my issue it seems. I had set a flag to disable the new wayland color management which would have working DRM playback on HDR, but windows would be too dark. With the old color management they were correctly bright, but DRM playback wouldn’t work with hardware acceleration. Chrome simply didn’t have the flag set which is why it worked. For now I’ll have to use X11 as a workaround which hurts but it works

7

I am having the same issue and I am fedora right now, my fix was to downgrade 4-5 versions as i remember it usd to work earlier very well, currently i am using brave-origin, disabling hardware acceleration is not a solution as it makes the browser very sluggish and the issue persisting from 4-5 updates is just bad this point now, should have been fixed by now , currently on latest fedora version with using GNOME as DE and on Wayland, using x11 as a workaround glitches other things, the current brave-origin version that i am using and its working fine is

Brave Origin 1.92.144 Chromium: 150.0.7871.186 (Official Build) (64-bit)
8

I have also listed this issue in github too, it has only been catergorized till now nothing else for weeks, and to give more info i downgraded brave-origin using dnf only