Poco F1 Gets Widevine L1 Support For HD Streaming
Xiaomi launched the Poco F1 in India back in the month of August last year. The smartphone with a budget price and flagship specifications witnessed rave reviews globally. But soon after the launch, the controversy arose that the device lacked the support for Widevine L1 certificate; which is necessary to stream HD digital content on services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. According to a senior Xiaomi India executive, the Poco F1 has been granted Widevine L1 certification. The executive also states that an OTA update with the L1 certification is being rolled out for beta users. Besides, the upcoming general public MIUI update for the device will incorporate this certificate. Therefore, the users will soon be able to stream HD content on their devices after updating the latest update.
Poco F1: Widevine L1 Support
The Widevine L1 certification is granted by Widevine Technologies, which is owned by Google. It is an encryption system to distribute video content from streaming services to consumer devices. When it was discovered that the Poco F1 lacked the Widevine L1 certification; it became identified that the device was incapable of streaming video content higher than 540p resolution. Similarly, OnePlus’s yesteryear flagship, the OnePlus 5T was also plagued by the same problem which was sorrowfully never eradicated.
The Poco F1 has started receiving the update supporting the Widevine L1 certificate in the latest MIUI 10 9.2.25 Beta. It was earlier speculated that the devices lacking certain hardware components cannot be Widevine L1 certified. However, Xiaomi has demonstrated that the aforementioned problem can indeed be fixed via software modifications. In addition to the L1 certification, streaming services also need to whitelist devices to allow them to stream HD content. Streaming services including Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar have already updated their respective applications to allow Poco F1 to be able to stream HD content. However, Netflix is yet to roll an update that allows updated Poco F1 units to stream HD content on its platform.
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The update on the Xiaomi Poco F1 should arrive as a sigh of relief to existing users of the device. Unfortunately, the company has not provided any information on the stable release of the update; but it is expected to roll out as soon as the current software is out of Beta and has the bugs ironed out.
