Anyone else have a problem with web videos pausing their display?

[Mercutio]

This is driving me mildly nuts and I've done a few rounds of testing without making any headway, so I'm just going to ask others.
My main desktop (Haswell-E, 80GB RAM, GTX970) freezes when I encounter certain web videos. The freeze lasts 1.5 seconds or so, just long enough to be annoying but not enough to represent a real problem. It happens in every contemporary web browser (Palemoon, Firefox, Chrome, IE) I have installed and the container can be either HTML5 or Flash.
As far as I can tell, the videos are just regular old x.264, something this machine should be able to handle even a dozen at a time. The files that trigger the issue are most often some sort of animated .GIF but after digging it actually appears that it sometimes happens because of ads that aren't even being displayed on-screen.

This machine is connected to a 32" FHD display (an older Dell Ultrasharp) via HDMI and a pair of 24" Asus FHD screens. Moving the monitor inputs around or just using one doesn't seem to help either. My theory is that the PC is dropping in and out of a hardware accelerated video mode, but I can't think of a reason for that to happen. I've only been having this problem for the last couple weeks, so I switched around between the last four releases of nVidia drivers but as of this morning I'm back to the 374.52 release. Changing driver versions didn't fix anything.

I suppose the next stop will be to blow away this Windows install but before I go that crazy, has anyone else seen this or anything like it?

 

[Howell]

Just for clarity, the video play freezes, the desktop display freezes, or the whole computer freezes.

 

[timwhit]

Can you run a Linux LiveCD and see if it happens?

 

[Mercutio]

Just for clarity, the video play freezes, the desktop display freezes, or the whole computer freezes.

Main display, whichever one it is. Windows doesn't accelerate video on secondary displays unless you have something that's stretched over from the primary, so this probably isn't surprising. If my pointer happens to be over on one of the other screens, I can continue to interact with that display as normal. Audio output behaves normally as well, but if I happen to have a video player open, I'll lose a few dozen frames in the moment the video mode changes.

re: Linux. I haven't. I'm assuming at this point that it's something Windows specific. Linux has enough weirdness of its own if you're trying to make it do things with expensive video cards. I'll check that if I get to the point that I think it's a hardware issue though.

Another thought I've had is that some of the various media players I have can use tunable codecs and I've been messing with that stuff recently, but I haven't done anything out of the ordinary with codecs in my browsers, or at least nothing stranger than installing the K-lite Codec pack.

The Skylake i3 attached to the TV in my living room has a GTX750 and doesn't seem to have any issues, but it's more or less a dedicated Kodi machine.

 

[ddrueding]

The closest issues I've seen is the video window alone crashing or freezing, but only on the new Windows Server pre-releases.

What happens when you disable hardware acceleration altogether?

 

[Mercutio]

I turned off the Desktop Experience for Windows Server entirely and... Nope, no pauses. Of course, that also means my video card is doing nothing but sucking electricity for no reason.

 

[Clocker]

Some websites have issues with video playback when using ad blockers like ABP and/or Ghostery. If you are using any blockers, disable them, restart your browser and give it another go.

 

[Mercutio]

That's not even remotely safe. I also use the same collection of addons and configuration on all my other machines, which don't have any issues.

 

[Clocker]

Sorry Merc I didn't catch the fact that the problem is specific to one PC.

 

[Mercutio]

Not a problem man.

I'm sitting here and watching Process Explorer and flipping through Imgur with Palemoon and Chrome right now. I'll catch a pattern eventually.

 

[Mercutio]

Shockwave 12.1 for Windows seems to have been the issue. I still don't know why it was a problem, but any time it was getting invoked, my PC would drop out of its hardware accelerated video mode. There might be a better way to do it, but I had to sit there with a web object inspector, my ad and script blockers and a process monitoring tool in order to actually figure that out. I can live without having Shockwave installed. I probably haven't really needed it for a couple years anyway.