Interesting. I don’t think you need codecs for H264. It should be supported. Now that we know it’s somehow an issue in all browsers playing video can you try to update whatever video driver your are using? The browsers will surely try to cache the video to play it back over the hardware encoder (H264 hardware playback is supported even by ancient graphics chips) so it would need the driver for that as well. Maybe the video driver has a bug. This would explain why all browser exhibit this behavior and VLC does not. I am quite sure VLC interfaces the driver differently or maybe even not at all and does the decoding in software.
This may be a stupid question. Probably is, but… how? This is a Surface Laptop Go. It’s fully up to date, there’s no discrete graphics card I’ve installed and when I go to the MS website for the Surface Laptop Go ( Download Surface Laptop Go Drivers and Firmware. from Official Microsoft Download Center) it has a download link for firmware but it also says that it is included in latest updates which I already have. I guess I can try installing those but did you mean anything more specific?
Yes, VLC traditionally packaged its own codecs with it and uses those, I believe.
Heat related issue?!
Interesting.
You might need to bring out ‘the big guns’ and go to sysinternals and download process monitor.
When process monitor is running you could then add the column ‘duration’ which shows the number of seconds a process takes to complete. Then using a (filter > filter > duration is more than .5 ) can tell it to show any processes events that took longer than say 500 milliseconds.
If it is a process that is taking extended period of time it hopefully will appear in the list and it also shows you where the process is running from and what operation it was doing.
Process Monitor (and most of the sysinternals tools) are not the most beginner friendly tools but they are very good when you need to get to the nitty gritty.
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I’m not an expert on this but I opened up the Event Viewer and looked for any errors. There were some old ones but nothing recent enough to be this and didn’t match anything likely. There are no errors when it happens. The video pauses as if I had manually paused it. There’s no stutter, no buffer, no delay when I press play. It just stops.
Almost certainly not. As stated it happens exactly 1min 3seconds every time, consistently and repeatedly. No other errors, general system performance problems or anything else. I could try videos of different bitrates (if that’s the right term) to see if they pause at different times.
Weirdly the problem went away the other evening. Happened a couple of times at the start of watching something and then I realised after a while that it just wasn’t happening. I felt maybe I’d been a fool because before that I had done an update from the downloaded update from MS’s Surface support site and I thought was it really a case of just not having updated things? But then the problem has come back again since.
Big guns is why I’m here. There HAS to be an explanation for this. And right now it makes it very hard to enjoy watching anything. And I’m not going to sit at my desk to watch stuff on my desktop system.
Really appreciate the suggestion. I have downloaded and run it. My first reaction is to ask if my Surface does anything other than run SearchIndexer.exe.
The second thing is having put the >0.5 filter on as you suggest to play some video and look for anything that occurs when the problem happens. Nothing that I can see as yet but I’ll poke around some more. Thank you.
I played around a little with your suggestion as a base. I ended up excluding events that had a duration < 0.001 which removed a bunch of the cruft. I also excluded events where there was a result other than SUCCESS. I plainly don’t quite understand what I’m reading because to me it seems weird to see things like a “RegQueryValue” operation result in a buffer overflow. Doesn’t this just mean it’s querying a value from the registry - how do you mess that up? But when I see the words Buffer Overflow I am conditioned to hone in on it with great suspicion. And I do see the path it was querying was HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MMDevices\Audio\Render and I do see the process itself is msedge.exe which is what I’m currently using. The obvious thing is to try one of the other browsers (it occurs in all) and see if I get the same event under one of their processes. There’s a list of modules in the Process tab and I note one of them is ffmpeg.dll. Obviously that’s video related but doesn’t (I presume) mean that it’s a factor here, just that it’s a module Edge has loaded, right?
Is there anything I shouldn’t post here from that event information? I see a bunch of hashes I don’t know the purpose of and don’t know if it’s some unique identifier for my machine or anything. But I can post some suspect events here maybe. I’m going to try and filter specifically on this event and see if I get one for every time the video pauses. Though might be a red herring - I don’t get why you’d get a buffer overflow on reading a registry key if that’s what the name means.
Some good questions you pose.
Microsoft Edge is loaded by default as a startup program so if it is edge thats causing the issue which affects other browsers, then setting edge as ‘disabled’ in the task manager startup might possibly fix the issue.
Given it happens on a regular basis an application of some sort is doing something so stopping as many programs as possible and starting each one as per normal operation one by one till the problem re-appears is one method to diagnose/find it.
Regarding posting event information, I would leave that when you’ve narrowed it down more as currently it’s probably too broad (but I could be wrong).
It may also get to the point that it would be easier for you to re-install from scratch and install your apps (this depends on how much tweaking/customisation and specific applications you have loaded)…
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@ozbitty Thank you very much for the reply. I disabled Edge on start-up but it didn’t make any difference. I actually have most other applications that try to start on start-up also disabled already.
I have a wild additional piece of information that I just discovered. I thought to see what impact pausing the video would do. It’s happening precisely at 1 min 3 seconds (or within the margins of my reflexes with a stop watch app on my phone). So what happens if I start playing a video, let it run for twenty seconds, pause it for twenty and then hit play again? Does it continue to run for another forty-three seconds before stopping itself? Or does it now stop having played only 43 seconds in total? I.e. does the “dead” time count? Well it turns out it does.
I want to re-emphasise something from the very first post which is that the video isn’t stuttering, it isn’t hanging or slow to resume. It is indistinguishable from hitting pause.
With the fact that time the video isn’t playing counts towards the Clock, I feel like it’s more like an event or something that is causing it to pause but I don’t know what. And the clock also only seems to count from it’s last actual pause not a deliberate one. I.e. when it freezes, I can leave it five minutes and then hit play and it will run for 1 minute and 3 seconds. BUT, if I re-start it, pause for twenty seconds manually, restart, then I only get the remaining time, e.g. (63 - 20 seconds).
FWIW, there was a Windows preview update which I’ve just run so I’m on the lastest mainstream stuff. You ask if it would be possible to reinstall the OS on here. It would - I don’t really have data per se on here and the odd stuff I’d have to reinstall like Docker Desktop (yes, this is also disabled on start-up), is a fairly easy task. However, it’s a last resort because either it doesn’t fix it or if it does, I will forever not know what has caused the most bizarre problem I have ever encountered.
I welcome any suggestions. Tat this point we’ve reached the bounds of my knowledge. I have endeavoured to be scientific in trying things and describing it in detail, but I don’t know how to fix it.
That’s very specific behavior, almost like a human designed it to be annoying. . .
Malware? Grasping at straws.
I’ve considered that. But I have anti-virus and nothing showing and hasn’t done for all the time I’ve been suffering this. Which is over a month. And it’s so very weird - who still writes malware just to troll people anymore? These days it’s all about subverting your machine for botnets or stealing credit card numbers, etc. The last thing malware does in this day and age is deliberately announce itself.
The fact that it is precise intervals and unaffected by manual pauses suggests to me that some process begins when a video starts playing and either through something like a memory leak or something else, fails after a specific time or is ended by something else at a specific time. To see if perhaps it might be some kind of memory leak that I could trigger sooner or later I thought about trying different bandwidths of videos though it seemed unlikely that hadn’t already been the case. However, as a short cut along the lines I decided to just play two videos at once. So get this:
I had been playing a video on Rumble and it had consistently paused every 1 min 3 secs without fail, watching for maybe ten minutes. I clicked on some other video in the list whilst this one played and opened it in a new window. I snapped it to the side so I now had two browser windows (Brave browser fwiw) side by side playing videos, I muted the new one for sanity. I sat there with my stop watch to see if they would both pause at the same time, have independent 1min 3 sec time periods, or if I’d see time periods reduce to something like 32 seconds or something, e.g. some sort of memory leak or buffer overflow that caused it to fill up twice as quickly. Guess which happened?
That’s right - none of them! From the moment I started playing the second video in tandem, neither of the videos had inexplicable freezes. I let them both play for a time. After a while, I closed the second window to see if the first would resume the behaviour from before. It did not. I reloaded that tab to see if it would start doing it again. It hasn’t yet. Still going.
I have never seen anything like this. I am capturing all sorts of information here about the symptoms and what effects it but I’ve no idea what to do to investigate this further or resolve it.
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Sounds like maybe ad-blocker related. ad trying to play and messes up the video
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Thanks for the reply, but as detailed earlier if I download an mp4 video and play it in VLC it plays right through no problem. If I play the same video in a browser, i.e. no ads, just an mp4 file opened in Brave or Edge or Firefox, it freezes every 1min 3 seconds.
So I can’t see how it is related to an ad blocker.
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Are you using bluetooth/wireless speakers/headphones/alexa/etc? If connected (even if not currently active) these can send a pause signals, which I could see browsers obeying and VLC potentially ignoring.
Also try disconnecting the keyboard if there is one attached. These may have a media start/stop function, and I’ve seen rare claims before of possible issues resulting from this firing off for some reason, though that should be more of a random thing.
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Very good suggestion about Bluetooth devices. I haven’t been listening via them but there are a couple of devices paired (a speaker and some headphones). I think both were out of range in at least some of the times this has been happening but disabling Bluetooth isn’t something I have tried so I’ll retest that way.
The keyboard is something I had considered. It’s actually a built in keyboard and it does have a play/pause button. I briefly considered if it might be a dodgy key but the regularity of the issue wasn’t something I could reconcile with a physical keyboard problem.
Thanks for the suggestions. Will try.
@Log I would quite literally buy you a case of beer or something right now. It was Bluetooth. Never even occurred to me because I almost never, ever use bluetooth devices with this laptop. But I did try it out when I bought a new speaker a while back. You’d think I’d make the connection but it is entirely possible that I just didn’t watch any videos in the browser on this device for quite a while as I travel a bit. I imagine the times when it was working were when I was out of range of the device.
The device, fwiw, is a Denon speaker. I normally play music to it via Spotify, not Bluetooth but it was paired. I first disabled Bluetooth on the laptop and the problem immediately ceased. I then re-enabled and problem reoccurred, removed the speaker from the list of paired devices, problem went away again. Confirmed.
For nearly two months I have been unable to watch a YouTube video, Amazon movie, Rumble or whatever without having to hit the space bar every 1min 3 seconds. WHY being paired with a Denon speaker does this I do not know. But I can now use my laptop properly again.
Thank you. You really helped me. Good karma on you!
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Getting this figured out makes me feel better, too.
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Dear Hondo and Log, i have red your blog and finally my problem got solved too. I was having this issue for 4 weeks too and went crazy about it. BIG THANKS to Hondo for not giving up and Log giving the solution. I was about to reinstall the laptop, but saved by the blog! Super thanks.
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