Solved Help with a mystery! Video playback pauses every 1 minute 3 seconds

Software & Operating Systems
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This one’s a doozy. Playing an online video and it pauses every 1 minute and 3 seconds. This period identified with a stop watch and multiple tests. This occurs in multiple streaming platforms for example both YouTube and Rumble but other sites as well. This occurs independent of browser - happens in both Brave and Edge. Happens only on my WIndows 11 Surface Laptop Go. At least I have never witnessed it on my desktop or phone. Desktop uses wired LAN but phone uses WiFi like the laptop. Video is only paused, not lagging. It will play perfectly in between the pauses and resumes immediately on clicking play. Developer Tools in the browsers show the usual cruft of errors here and there but nothing I have identified as relevant. The problem persists and has lasted multiple days, restarts of browser or laptop matter not. I have had the problem before - same in all details and it lasted I think a week but at some point stopped. But has recently come back (last few days I think).

I thought perhaps it might be something funky with my anti-virus and disabling protection did appear to fix it at first as I then played through an entire 40min video without it happening. But it may have been coincidence or madness because since then it no longer seems to make a difference.

I feel like the protagonists in Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack at precise intervals but for no apparent reason. Anyone seen anything like this before or suggest where to start?

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Have you updated the firmware?

How much RAM do you have and are you hitting swap somehow?

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I’ve had something similar happen intermittently on my PC. I always assumed it was HID related.

Does it happen if a different window is focused?

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I’m not sure I’ve ever updated the firmware on this device but certainly not recently. It’s the 8GB version of the Surface Laptop Go so I see no reason it would be running out. And in fact checking just now I still have about 3GB free. Happens even with only a single tab of the browser open.

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It happens with a different window in focus or a different tab in the same browser. One minute and three seconds, unaltered.

Thanks for replies, both.

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I disconnected from my home WiFi and connected via a hotspot on my phone (5G connection). It still happens.

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Aaaaaand after three days of this it has once again inexplicably stopped.

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how much free space on your drive? Have you purged your internet cache?

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Thanks for the reply. 26GB free on my drive and no significant deletions or adds recently. This is my casual browse the internet, remote into things laptop. No real heavy lifting.

I can’t remember how long it lasted last time but at least days, maybe over a week. At some point it went away. This time it’s been happening for… three days I think? Because I think it was happening for two days before I got sick enough of restarting videos every minute to make the post. And sometime today I noticed that the problem had gone away agin.

Regards Internet cache, it happens in both Brave and Edge which I don’t think share any cache?

I think there was a Windows update just before the problem. Just fwiw.

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Browsers don’t share caches as far as I know. It’s just that I’ve seen some crazy broken shit on websites due to an incomplete file / broken cookie. So it’s almost my first goto to try and resolve the issue. one of the others is to reboot the machine or to simply update the browsers.

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The problem survives reboots. A browser update I did not try but as it happened on two differet browsers I am looking for something in common between them or independent.

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Set a hammer next to your laptop while you use it, so it knows what’s at stake.

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A friend had an issue about a year ago where he had microstutters in some games he would play.

Turns out he had too many games installed on steam, and steam would create these stutters. He uninstalled some of the games and the problem vanished.

If you have steam running I would suggest closing it down to see if that makes a difference.

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I like your thinking but my laptop has seen my bank account. It knows I would be bluffing.

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Nope. No Steam installed and the problem is back again. It’ll happen without anything other than the browser running and no load. So from sometime yesterday it went away and now it is back again. It’s not a stutter per se. The video just stops playing and resumes instantly if I hit play. It’s like something prompts it to just stop playing.

How can I diagnose this? It seems specific to this laptop, the only Windows 11 device I have for what it’s worth. Same video / source will play fine on another device on the same WiFi network so I’m sort of ruling out network issues. I did think maybe something to do with my anti-virus but it happened when that was disabled as well.

Anyone suggest what I can do to investigate this?

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Thank you, that made me smile. My guess would be some setting in regards to power saving, maybe even in one of the devices drivers. I don’t think Youtube and Rumble would both experience a bug like that in the code of their site, affecting only specific devices, while you already tested the sites on different browsers. Same here, I don’t think it is two different browsers exhibiting the problem at the same time. Or wait a second, was the new Edge now chromium based as well? In that case you could test the videos on Firefox, it’s free and a completely independent browser. Certainly if the problem still occurs my reasoning would be that the operating system or drivers are doing that and somehow trigger a playback stop for whatever reason.

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Thanks for the suggestions. So yes, Edge became Chromium based some time ago. I have been looking in the browser console for errors and there was one about play event being interrupted which I got excited about but then it appeared to be unrelated as I’d clear it out and then the problem would persist without any further errors.

I have a Firefox variant on here. I’ll try with that and post back shortly.

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Yes. Tried with Librewolf (a Firefox fork) and I got excited to begin with because it appeared to play for over two minutes without pausing but then it did. Thereafter it’s doing the same 1min 3 seconds (by a stopwatch) as the other two browsers.

I’m going to download a YouTube video (assuming I can do so without changing the codec) and find something to play it locally. VLC. I don’t know if that uses the same actual libraries or not but it’s all information I guess.

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Okay. We’ve struck gold. I don’t know what it means but I have unearthed a significant fact. Following your suggestion about a third browser, as I said, I got the idea to download a video (I used one of those sites that gets videos from Rumble) and save it locally as a .mp4 to play it in something like VLC. In VLC it played fine. But THEN I opened the same file in Brave and what do you know - precisely 1 minute 3 seconds into the video, it froze.

So it’s not a network thing unless there’s something very weird going on. Maybe a codec that all three browsers share but which VLC packages its own? So - I don’t really know where to go from here but I’ll say that all Windows updates including optional ones are installed, fwiw.

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From VLC, it says that the mp4 file was encoded with Lavf58.76.100 and in the codec information it says:
image

I don’t know how I go about updating Windows codecs in this day and age or even if that’s the right thing to do. I haven’t had to do that since < 2010 at least… Any suggestions welcome.