Kodi v18.x can now play Widevine encrypted streams which has opened up a world of add-ons that can LEGALLY play a number of streaming internet videos, such as those from my local sports TV provider which is great considering they do not provide a native Android TV app. However, it appears that my TV (Sony X950G) is just not capable of playing these streams; at least via Kodi. The result is regular video compression artifacts with random pixelated frames throughout playback. There should be no reason why the Mediatek SoC is not perfectly capable of decrypting these streams and playing them, but it appears that there is an issue with Widevine playback. This could be a broader "Android" issue too, since even my phone (Galaxy S10) shows similar artifacts, albeit to a lesser extent. Kodi on PC exhibits no such issues whatsoever and the streams play flawlessly.

I'd love to hear from more Android TV users to see whether they experience the same thing or not. If you feel like trying this, please report back with your findings.

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Steps:Create a file called test.strm and paste the following contents into it:

#KODIPROP:inputstreamaddon=inputstream.adaptive
#KODIPROP:inputstream.adaptive.license_type=com.widevine.alpha
#KODIPROP:inputstream.adaptive.license_key=https://proxy.uat.widevine.com/proxy?video_id=48fcc369939ac96c&provider=widevine_test||R{SSM}|
#KODIPROP:inputstream.adaptive.manifest_type=mpd
https://storage.googleapis.com/wvmedia/cenc/h264/tears/tears.mpd 

Copy the file to a flash drive, or to your TV directly.Add a "Video source" to Kodi, pointing to the location of the file and load it.

If you did everything correctly, Kodi should load a free DRM-protected video called Tears of Steel. Let it play for a few minutes and look out for blocky artifacts on-screen.

Here is a video showing the corruption. Timecodes in the description. https://youtu.be/RCC23Y1lxGo

Thanks in advance!