Freezing during video playback

I am having issues with videos freezing during playback.  It happens within 2-3 minutes of playback for all my videos (several different formats on my hard drives.)  I am using Cyberlink PowerDVD 14 ultra as my go to player but have also tried WMP and VLC with not much better results.  I am on Winodws 8 Pro with Nvidia GTX 680.  Not sure what the issue is so I thought posting here might help me remedy the issue.  Never had this issue until now, just clean installed windows 8 the other day since I was having hard drive issues.  Installed the chipset driver from the manufacturers website and my video driver is up to date. Anyone got any suggestions? Here is my dxdiag https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_qQnNKKg7mDWWFaUTc3cHlsUW8/view?usp=sharing

This is most certainly a hardware or driver issue.

Does the whole computer freeze (permanently until a restart)? Or does just the video freeze, while audio continues?

A possible cause could be overheating. Clean the inside of your computer. Remove dust from the heatsinks and fans. Cotton swaps are useful for cleaning the fans.

Did you replace your harddrive, or did you just format it? Scan the drive for errors, and enable the option to "scan for bad sectors". The scan will take longer (up to 2-3 hours if very large), but it will find damaged areas, and prevents those areas from being used again. Freezes and slowdowns occur when Windows tries to read data from a damaged sector.

Also update your sound driver. That is also a common cause of video playback freezes.

Admin wrote:This is most certainly a hardware or driver issue.

Does the whole computer freeze (permanently until a restart)? Or does just the video freeze, while audio continues?

A possible cause could be overheating. Clean the inside of your computer. Remove dust from the heatsinks and fans. Cotton swaps are useful for cleaning the fans.

Did you replace your harddrive, or did you just format it? Scan the drive for errors, and enable the option to "scan for bad sectors". The scan will take longer (up to 2-3 hours if very large), but it will find damaged areas, and prevents those areas from being used again. Freezes and slowdowns occur when Windows tries to read data from a damaged sector.

Also update your sound driver. That is also a common cause of video playback freezes.

I recently cleaned the computer of dust and the whole video player freezes but windows remains operable. The audio does not continue while the freeze occurs. I did not replace the hard drive but instead did a clean install of windows to a different hard drive (I have 5 in my tower). Once I did that I did format the problematic hard drive. I will try the sound driver update and the drive scan and let you know.

Disk scan had no errors and audio driver didnt solve issue either.

Does music playback work? If so, go to MPC-HC options > Playback > Output, and select the NULL renderer for video. Test if playback works. A black screen is normal, as the video is not being rendered now. If this works, then we at least know the problem is directly related to the video rendering.

Any problems playing games or videos on websites?
In case you enabled hardware acceleration in the video decoder, try with software decoding.

Admin wrote:Does music playback work? If so, go to MPC-HC options > Playback > Output, and select the NULL renderer for video. Test if playback works. A black screen is normal, as the video is not being rendered now. If this works, then we at least know the problem is directly related to the video rendering.

Any problems playing games or videos on websites?
In case you enabled hardware acceleration in the video decoder, try with software decoding.

Music works fine in windows media player and powerdvd, also the audio continues while the video render is turned off for videos. Videos for websites have not given me any issues and I do not have any video games installed that I can test. Not sure how to change the acceleration for the decoder.

Now that I notice it, the LAV icons show up in the notification bar when I play videos with MPC but not with powerdvd or WMP. Not sure if that has anything to do with it but MPC does play videos fine.

VLC uses its own private codecs for everything. PowerDVD uses its own for most formats. WMP uses codecs from Microsoft by default for certain formats.

You can manipulate which codecs WMP uses with the Codec Tweak Tool.
CTT > Win7DSFilterTweaker > MS Codec Tweaks > Disable MS DTV-DVD Video decoder

Hardware acceleration is disabled by default in LAV Video decoder. You can access its settings by clicking on its icon.

Might be something with the other players then because everything works perfectly on MPC. Not sure where to go from there then.

It could be that those other players are failing because of hardware acceleration. In that case there is something wrong with the driver or the GPU.

In VLC it is easy to disable:
Tools > Preferences > Input/Codecs > Hardware accelerated decoding > Disable

I am not familiar with the settings of PowerDVD, but I am sure it has an option for it somewhere.

For WMP it can probably be done with a Registry hack. I can look into that if disabling HWA in VLC solves the problem.