Poco F1 Widevine L1 support is rolling out to MIUI 10 Beta users. We were the first to report back in August 2018, that the then recently launched budget flagship, in fact lacked support for the HD video streaming pre-requisite.
We’d like to think we (and our good friend Jay who discovered the and informed us) played a role in getting the issue widely reported, to the extent that it reached the company’s ears.
Widevine L1 support is now seen as a must have requirement for any device, Samsung even touted it as a feature of the Galaxy M10 and Galaxy M20 on stage, during the launch event.
Six months have gone by since our report about the issue, and it appears that Xiaomi has addressed it. Poco F1 Widevine L1 support is real.
You could wait for Xiaomi to roll out the update to your device, or if your feeling rather adventurous, you can manually flash is the update which brings Poco F1 Widevine L1 support. And that would be, the MIUI 9.2.25 developer ROM, which can be found on the official website.
This does raise the question, how is it possible to patch Widevine L1 DRM for the Poco F1 via an OTA, without users having to ship the device back to the company? You know, like how OnePlus claimed was the only way to resolve the issue for the OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T.
According to an article by XDA, Google introduced a method to patch Widevine with an OTA update, back in mid-2017. That’s what Xiaomi has used to provide Poco F1 Widevine L1 support, through an over-the-air update, which is highly convenient for all users. Not so much for OnePlus users, right?
So, all things considered, you could say that Xiaomi has handled the issue with savoir faire.
