Videos now often have black squares and areas

[Beerina]

For the past month or so, often videos that I play have black squares and large black areas. This lasts a number of seconds, then suddenly the video is clear.

I think this is due to mpeg-style compression not sending an initial full frame, where subsequent frames are all diffs off the previous one. Hence if you don't have a clear start frame, you get squirrelly crap until the stream sends another full frame, or something like that.

Anyway, this is cross web-site, cross-player, cross everything. Some YouTube, some tumblr, various other web sites with videos, they all suffer this problem, and it all started at once.

Therefore this must have been a Windows 10 update.

Is anyone seeing this problem at all? I do not see it on my Android device, so it can't be my ISP intercepting and extra-compressing (crappily) video streams. I can think of half a dozen places such a systematic error could have cropped up, none of which I can do much about. I'm more interested that, if I am seeing it, many others should be. Yet a fix hasn't rolled out yet.

 

[The Man]

Sounds like pixelation, probably loss of signal somewhere.

 

[grmcdorman]

I don't see that; running Win 10 as well.

It is also possible that this is a hardware issue; video streams can exercise hardware paths that aren't used in normal areas. Do you play video games on this computer? Could you download a video on your Android device and try to play it back on your desktop?

 

[GodMark2]

Many (most) video cards now use hardware decompression for MPEG video, and most video drivers are capable of using that feature. If either the card or driver has bugged out, the symptoms you have are one likely result. Ensuring that you have the actual latest drivers from the manufacturer website (not Win 10 'update') may be enough to solve this.

 

[Beerina]

I was wondering about my video driver. I have a 980 video card, so maybe the latest auto-update screwed it up.

Also, some video streams have auto throttle-down/up/etc. where it just plays with as much data as it gets; perhaps some switch got set somewhere to go go go as fast as possible and to hell with the quality. I'd rather it wait an additional 0.5 seconds before starting.

On things like vines and whatnot, it can go through 2 or 3 loops before finally getting rid of the corruption.

 

[Beerina]

Updated latest drivers (why in God's name is it 360 meg? And that is solely the Win 10 64-bit special for my 980, not some generic installer) and reset Chrome to default, rebooted, same issue.

 

[Sceptic-PK]

A weird Flash issue?

 

[The Man]

A weird Flash issue?

If it is flash related I've seen some answers that recommend disabling the hardware acceleration.


https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-playe....html#main_Solve_video_playback_issueshttp://

 

[russell_morris]

NVidia's last two WHQL drivers for the GeForce chipsets had this issue (I experienced it as well, always with animated GIFs).

NVidia released a new Beta driver version (375.76) as a hotfix (see https://forums.geforce.com/default/...ouncing-geforce-hotfix-driver-version-375-76/). This has fixed the glitchy GIF playback on my machine. There is apparently still some Folding @home breakage, however.