All sort of weird issues with video

[JonnyNewAgain]

Hi

I've got about as far as I can with Google, and have run out of things to try next!

I have this issue with video playback. It's intermittent and is fixed (temporarily) by rebooting. Basically, every now and then, video playback freezes (e.g. Youtube, BBC news site, etc). I just get the spinning circle like it's buffering, but the sound is playing. If I switch the sound off, the video then plays. It quite often happens if I have just adjusted volume. Also, it quite often happens when the video plays an ad.

I've tried getting rid of plug ins, clearing out my browsing history, turning off hardware acceleration. None of that works. It's like the machine is running out of memory to do both video and sound.

It's a Mac Mini (2018) running Big Sur with 8GB of memory.

Thanks for any suggestions or help!

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Is this just in Safari?

 

[Nukeban]

Yea, try some other browsers and see what happens. That would be the place to start.

I doubt you're running out of memory, 8GB should be plenty to play videos. And you have a recent machine, so it should have plenty of power for playing videos.

Did you perhaps recently update OSX to Big Sur? If yes, did you have this issue prior to that?

 

[JonnyNewAgain]

Thanks for your replies.

It happens in Chrome. In Safari (when the problem happens), the videos play at about 4 or 5 times normal speed, but the issue in Safari doesnt seem to be related to the sound as it does in Chrome. However, both require a reboot.

The issue occurred prior to the upgrade to Big Sur. I literally can't work out why it's happening. I wonder if it's something to do with the bluetooth speakers I use? I thought it might be wifi strength, but I bought a LAN switch recently and don't use wifi anymore, and it still happens. Aaargh it's driving me nuts!

 

[Nukeban]

Hmm.... Yea, a puzzle.

Do you have an external drive you could wipe clean and then install a fresh copy of OSX on? You could boot from that drive and test in that environment. If the problem persists, sounds like a hardware issue. If the problem is solved, seems like a software issue. That would begin to narrow the list of suspects a bit, a place to start?

 

[JonnyNewAgain]

Thanks Nukeban - I like your thinking and will give it a try