Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, I wasn't really sure. I got a new computer a few weeks ago and I am having severe playback issues with downloaded videos. The playback keeps freezing and the video pixelates. I've tried windows media player, VLC player and Media Player 10 all with the same results. This is happening with .mov, .wmv, .avi andf .mp4 extensions.
I am running 64 bit Windows 10, which came with the computer. I've tried updating my graphics card driver and that didn't help. I've also tried to get answers from microsoft troubleshooting, but I can't seem to find the answer. Can anyone help?
Here's an example of what videos look like for me:
You seem to have ticked all the boxes I would have suggested already. Clearly not a corruption issue since having that many files corrupted would certainly mean more trouble than just video playback and clearly not an application problem since it happens on all the common players you've cited.
Only suggestion I can think of would be to try the next-tp-latest version of the video driver. Sometimes a buggy build gets out in the wild. It is rare, but it happens. Beyond that, off the top of my head, I can't think of anything beyond a freak hardware problem.
My newer laptop handles things well, but my my older computer has the same issues. The bitrates of these newer HD files are just way too high for it to process. For the old PC I solve things by reducing the dimensions of the files and thus the bitrate. There are many programs to do that but I'm happy with the no-frills WinFF https://www.biggmatt.com/winff/ It's main use is to convert file formats (like AVI to MP4) but other aspects of a video can be changed as well. The pics below show an example of how I do it. I first find in VLC the dimensions of the file I want to process, here being 1920x1080 (also confirming that the bitrate is pretty high). Then in WinFF I reduce the dimensions while also converting it to WMV format (it seems to process that faster). Hope those examples are clear.
It is a pain in the ass, but such is life in the HD lane with an SD computer. Don't know if this will solve your particular problem but I hope it helps someone out there anyway.
A note on downloading and installing WinFF: if the latest WinFF 1.5.5 version doesn't work, try one of the older WinFF 1.5.4 versions from the download page. I've tried other programs like TMPGEnc for such chores but WinFF uses much less CPU.
"New computer" doesn't really tell us anything. Is it an Intel or AMD CPU? How many cores? How much memory? Is the storage a conventional hard drive or an SSD?
Most new computers are plagued with tons of useless crapware running in the background. Look in Task Manager and see how many processes are running and what percentage of CPU is being used when a video plays? Did it come with Norton or MacAffee antivirus? Both are garbage that will bring your computer to a crawl.
As mentioned in another post, HD video is enormous and requires a lot of system resources to play correctly. A "budget" 2-core Celeron or other bottom-end CPU is not going to be adequate unless you shut down all superfluous background processes by deleting junk programs that came with the computer.
Virtually all modern hardware now contains a dedicated MP4 decoder chip to handle most of the processing for video. If both MP4 and older formats like WMV have the same playback problems, the issue is more fundamental like a bottleneck in the hard drive systems or just too many background programs using up all the memory.
Love you, too
