I had a few movies downloaded on my Chromebook, for trips or other situations. Last night was another situation: m router was down as there was no power in the neighborhood.
However, every time I tired to play one of my offline movies, the player would run for 9 seconds and stop. I'd see a little spinny circle, but no progress. Try to jump ahead: spinny circle.
I tired rebooting. I tried removing all extensions. I tried stopping things with task manager. I tried using my phone as a hot spot, to get past the 9 seconds. None of those fixed the offline movies.
I could play one of the titles by using a browser instead of the google play movies app, using my hot spot. It was interesting that the movie would stall for almost a second at the 9 second mark. This suggests to me that 9 seconds must be the point were some extra authorization check is happening.
The last step: reload the google play movie extension. Would I lose the offline movies? Maybe, but they weren't doing anything for me. I deleted the extension. I reloaded, using data from my cell phone plan via my phone's hotspot. All the downloaded movies were gone. I could play one of the titles that had been offline now, using the hotspot. But I wasn't going to watch or download a whole movie on my hotspot. Well, if I was on my last day of data of the month, I might have considered it, but I wasn't planning to stay up that much longer, especially after trying to get it to work so long.
This morning, I re-downloaded one of the movies. Turned off wifi, and it played the movie, sailing right past the 9 second mark.
Solution: re-install google movies, re-download.
It might have only taken re-downloading the titles, but as reloading the app cleared the 'bad' downloaded, so I can not verify,
My guess is there some sort of offline digital key, that may expire, or an OS upgrade may have impacted the validity of the keystore. However, I would have hoped being online to get past the 9 seconds would have allowed it to refresh, but I'm guessing there needs to be a reload of the entire keyed movie to make it valid.
My advice: check and refresh you offline video content regularly - my guess is at least once a month.
Note: this is on an older chromebook that doesn't [yet] support android apps.
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