Try DRM live
First we check what your device can do. Then you play an encrypted video and watch, while it plays, exactly what is happening.
Your device, right now
Probed in your browser through EME. No video, no account, no license needed.
Play protected content
Tears of Steel · una clave por calidad: 1080p exige hardware, 720p no
Try PlayReady against each scheme: same video, same key, but on many Edge builds PlayReady reads only cenc. On cbcs it receives a valid licence and still cannot decrypt — the hardest failure in all of DRM to diagnose.
What you are looking at
One video, served as DASH and as HLS. Widevine and PlayReady open the DASH; FairPlay opens the HLS. Your browser picks the system on its own — we do not tell it which — which is why the panel shows the one it ended up using: Widevine in Chrome, FairPlay in Safari, PlayReady in Edge.
It carries three keys, not one: 1080p, 720p and the audio each have their own. The 1080p key demands hardware protection (Widevine L1, PlayReady SL3000); the other two are happy with software. It is the same rule Netflix and Disney use to reserve their high qualities for certified devices.
So with Widevine on a desktop browser the player asks for all three licences and is granted two: you get 720p, not 1080p. On a phone or a TV with L1, all three are granted. The panel above lists every key with its status, so you can see which one you were refused.
The same rule, written the same way, is refused in two very different shapes. Widevine issues the licence and marks the key you are not entitled to as unusable: the player sees that status, discards that quality and carries on — the refusal is visible, and costs one resolution. PlayReady never issues anything: it answers a server error, and recovering from that mid-load is a documented, unfixed player problem. The quality is discarded all the same, but playback does not start.
Which is why with PlayReady this demo does what a real service does: it measures the device before loading. Windows ships two PlayReady clients — a software one, certified SL2000 however capable the machine, and a hardware one that only answers when named (recommendation.3000). If the hardware client exists, the demo asks with it and 1080p is genuinely granted; if it does not, 1080p is neither offered nor requested — the rule is applied before the request, not after the refusal. And if something is still left half-done, playback retries exactly once without the refused quality.
Which is why this is worth checking on a real device rather than in theory. This very Edge, asked Microsoft's diagnostic service, says it is SL2000 — not SL3000, even though EME advertises that it accepts that robustness. They are different things: what the browser negotiates, and what the device certificate attests.