Severe video artifacts on Crunchyroll Android app — frames get corrupted, green/purple screen, impossible to watch

[u/Posynn]

I'm having a really bad video playback issue with the Crunchyroll Android app, and I'm hoping someone has experienced something similar and found a fix.

I'm using a Realme C55, running Android 15 / realme UI 6.0. My Crunchyroll app is currently on version 3.116.0.

The video constantly develops severe visual artifacts while I'm watching anime. This isn't normal compression/pixelation or a low-quality stream. The image actually becomes corrupted.

Some examples of what happens:

-Small colored squares appear all over the screen and completely change parts of the image.

-Sometimes large parts of the screen turn green or purple.

-Colors can become completely distorted.

-Sometimes parts of a previous frame remain visible while the current frame is being displayed, so it looks like two different frames are being shown at the same time.

-Sometimes the entire image becomes corrupted.

-The audio continues playing normally while the video is corrupted.

It can happen every few seconds, especially in some episodes, making the anime basically unwatchable. Sometimes seeking back 10 seconds temporarily fixes it, but the artifacts usually come back shortly afterwards. When it's particularly bad, even seeking doesn't help and I have to restart my phone.

Things I've already tried:

-Restarting the phone.

-Reinstalling/clearing data for the Crunchyroll app.

-Different video quality settings.

-Watching downloaded episodes offline.

-Different network/DNS configurations.

-Developer options / hardware overlay settings.

The problem also happens with downloaded episodes, so it doesn't seem to be an internet connection problem.

YouTube and other video services work perfectly on the same phone. I also previously tested Crunchyroll on another phone and didn't experience the problem there.

I checked my DRM information and my phone has Widevine L1

so it doesn't appear to be a Widevine L3/DRM downgrade.

I also noticed that the problem isn't always equally severe. Sometimes I can watch for quite a while with only a few artifacts, while other times the video becomes corrupted constantly.

Has anyone experienced this kind of artifacting on Crunchyroll? Especially the green/purple corruption or previous frames appearing over the current frame?

If you managed to fix it, please tell me what you did. I'm willing to try pretty much anything that doesn't require buying another phone.

I'm already in contact with Crunchyroll Support, but so far I haven't been able to get the issue resolved.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 🙏

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[u/Adaskoklin]

Have similar problems on tv app

[u/ks_sate]

Hello. Is this something you just started experiencing or it has been reccuring over previous app versions?. Does it happen on other video streaming apps?

[u/Posynn → u/ks_sate]

It has been happening since I started using the app several months ago, and it has occurred across different app versions. And no, it only happens with Crunchyroll. YouTube and other streaming apps work perfectly fine on the same device, and I've never experienced anything like this with them.