Encrypted (DRM) Videos producing black screen during playback - USB Dock on MacOS 12.6

[IJSradlers]

I’ve tested this against the UD-6950H and another Plugable USB Dock model I have at my home office.

I’m using the newest Displaylink drivers from their website.

DisplayLink Manager Graphics Connectivity

Ventura 13, Monterey 12, Big Sur 11
Release: 1.8 | Oct 24, 2022

I noticed this issue a week or so trying to stream a video from the CraveTV site. No video appeared, just a black screen. Audio could be heard. This wasn’t an issue before then.

Same thing happened last night with a Udemy course. I tried multiple browsers on MacOS 12.6 with limited or no success. I noticed in Reddit a thread on this and disconnected the USB dock. Then things worked fine.

I had the previous Displaylink driver and things had been fine until the last week. I updated the Displaylink driver with no change in result.

For browsers, there is the plugin that is required for Udemy videos to play, but this would be across the board for DRM.

Widevine Content Decryption Module provided by Google Inc. v4.10.2449.0

I suspect this is related to Displaylink drivers because plugging in a VAVA USB Dock doesn’t encounter this issue. Whether it’s Displaylink or the Widevine plug in relating to the Displaylink driver is another question.

Thanks for any information/ solutions on this.

Rob

[MichaelS]

Hi Rob,

Thank you for contacting Plugable support.

The behavior you describe is most likely related to HDCP. HDCP is an authentication process that prevents non-licensed devices from playing back video or audio content over mediums such as HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, etc. This mainly applies to devices such as video players, monitors, even hubs, or in this case, docking stations such as the UD-6950H. _**Please note that there are some docking stations that support HDCP _

Software such as Netflix, Hulu, CraveTV, AppleTV, etc. requires HDCP in order to stream video and audio content. If there is a device along the chain where that video or audio content passes through that is not HDCP compliant (e.g. UD-6950H.), you will experience the behavior that you are seeing where video will not play, or you will not hear audio. Or some mix of issues in relation.

Browsers like Chrome or Safari do not require HDCP, whereas an application like CraveTV will, so the issue is not with the browsers themselves but rather the video playback application that you are using.

That said, unfortunately, the UD-6950H does not support HDCP. We do apologize for any confusion here as we try to do our best to call this out in our product listing under specifications seen here: https://plugable.com/products/ud-6950h

That all being said, we have had some users report that they were able to circumvent HDCP by disabling Hardware Acceleration within their Chrome browser. Again, since we do not support our product as being HDCP compliant, we cannot guarantee that this will work in your case as well.

But if interested, I provide a helpful link on how to disable Hardware Acceleration in Chrome for your convenience here: https://www.howtogeek.com/412738/how-to-turn-hardware-acceleration-on-and-off-in-chrome

Again we do apologize for any confusion as to HDCP compatibility, and thank you for reaching out and giving us a chance to help.

Best regards,

Michael S.