Advantages of installing Codec Pack?

Hi everyone,

This may be a rather noobish question, but I am experiencing a few issues on my computer where videos sometimes freeze up and my computer might lock up for a few seconds. I suspect the codecs may or may not be responsible. I am not entirely clear as to what the benefit is to installing this codec pack in it's entirety? Does this replace the codecs that comes with Windows? Are these codecs more efficient? Is it possible to just install the codecs missing?

I also realize that the codec packs update. How am I to know when there's an update if there's no utility to advise me? Is the best thing to do to just uninstall and then install the latest?

(I am running Windows 10 on an HP Omen, it's a rather capable machine)

Many thanks for your answers in advance!

The codec pack is actually pretty small. In your case the Basic or Standard version would be sufficient. It does not replace the codecs from Windows in a sense that those are removed. The codec pack only installs additional codecs. The codecs from the pack will get used instead of the ones from Windows in cases where they are considered to be better, meaning providing better performance, stability or more functionality. But everything can be adjusted and tweaked to your liking if needed. The codec pack is very flexible.

You can safely try the codec pack. If you don't like it, then simply uninstall it, and it will restore everything like the way it was.

The codec pack has an option to automatically check for updates. By default it checks once every 30 days. Updating is not a necessity. You are free to decide when to update. If everything works satisfactory, you can just keep using the same version. Updating is very easy, simply download and install. No need to uninstall the existing version first.

If the freezing continues to happen, then come back here and I may be able to help you. It might be a driver problem.

Thanks so much for taking the time to write all of that information out for me.

So, I updated to the latest and... Alas, whilst I was watching a movie, it froze up again. I am not sure if it's a driver issue, i'm confident I have the latest drivers available for my machine and as for my NVIDIA GPU, I have a utility that advises me of updates, seemingly at least every other week.

Your laptop also has an Intel GPU. The sound driver (Realtek?) is also important.

Another thing you can try:
Right-click on Start > Control Panel > System > Power Options > Select High Performance
> Change Plan Settings > Change Advanced Power Settings > Hard Disk > Increase to for example 30 minutes

I don't see those options, I suspect it's because my laptop doesn't use a "hard disk" in the traditional sense. It uses a PCIe SSD.

You can use a tool like GPU-Z to monitor your GPU during playback. And the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) to monitor CPU usage. Check if you see anything unusual when the freezes occur.