Hotstar Videos Stopped Playing On My Desktop PC

Today, I experienced a strange error on Disney + Hotstar on my Windows 11 desktop PC. It failed to load videos with the following error message.

I could see a retry button with the following text.

You can see the screenshot of the error message below.

I clicked the Retry button as instructed by the error message. Nothing happened, and the same error message appeared again.

I opened the Hotstar website on a Mozilla Private browsing. Some video streaming websites show compatibility issues when cookies are off.

So, I opened the www.hotstar.com on a regular Firefox window.

Everything looked fine until I played a video. You can see the result in the screenshot below.

Hotstar showed the error message - 'Something went wrong - Error code: PB_WEB_PL-4032_X' with a retry button.

To check whether the problem was because I attempted to play the Hotstar video on a Windows 11 desktop computer, I opened hotstar.com on Google Chrome browser.

To my surprise, Google Chrome showed no issues in running Hotstar videos. So, it is clear that the problem was not with the desktop computer but with the Firefox browser.

Sukanya Gopakumar confirmed this opinion in the comment section.

Comments from Dhanya Shiva and Ajith Thomas confirm my findings. They also faced problems with playing Hotstar videos on the Firefox browser. You can read their experiences in the comment section.

To fix the Disney Plus Hotstar Error pb_web_pl error, we must understand it first.

The error code does not give much information. So, I visited the Hotstar support page.

I landed on the following support page. To my surprise, the solutions provided on that page are insufficient. They provide two solutions. They are:

1. Refresh the page.

2. Update the browser.

I have refreshed the Disney Plus Hotstar video page multiple times without success. My Windows 11 computer has the latest version of Mozilla Firefox browser.

Since the official support page has no real solution, I searched further.

I found a solution from Ubuntu forums about setting the media App approval status on the Mozilla Firefox browser. It fixed the issue on my PC even though I am not using Ubuntu Linux.

Let us check how to resolve the problems with playing Disney Plus Hotstar video on a Desktop PC or laptop.

1. Type about:config on the Firefox address bar and press the enter key.

2. You will see a warning -Proceed with Caution. Click the button Accept the risk and Continue.

   
   
   

3. Type media.eme.require-app-approval on the search bar.

   
   
   

   Click the toggle button to change the status to True.

You may need to restart the Firefox browser. After this, you will face no problems playing videos and movies from the Hotstar website on your desktop computer.

Adhil Aboobacker and Roopesh Joshi confirmed this solution. You can read their confirmation in the comment section.