MPC-HC Problem: Video freezes randomly but audio continues

I'm on a recent install of Windows 11.
OS: Windows 11 Build 23H2 Version 10.0.22631
MPC-HC Version: 2.3.3 | Build Date: July 18, 2024

While watching movies of various types (mkv, mp4, etc), the video will randomly freeze, but the audio continues. MPC-HC is still fully functional, but the video will just stay frozen, it's as if the video is paused, but it's still playing, the time continues to pass, audio continues to playback fine.  I tried uninstalling K-Lite codec pack and reinstalling, but the problem still occurs. I tried updating to the newest version, but I still encounter this issue.

I really love MPC-HC and am very used to using it. I'd rather keep using it than having to switch to another player.

Can anyone help me fix this or tell me if MPC-HC has an error log somewhere I can check out? I'm hoping the log file may report the error right when the video freezes, which can help debug the problem.

Oh, and I tried switching to different playback outputs, I tried MPC Video Renderer, Enhanced Video Renderer and madVR, but the problem occurs no matter which one I pick. I primarily use madVR.

The problem occurs on different videos of different codec types. It's happened on twenty different kind of movies and shows.

Test if it also happens when you disable hardware decoding.

Admin wrote:Test if it also happens when you disable hardware decoding.

How can I do that? Sorry, I tried searching without luck.

Menu > Play > Filters > LAV Video Decoder > set Hardware decoder to NONE

And with random freezing you meant really random right? So without doing any interaction with the player or Windows. Because it matters if it happens only after seeking or after Windows resumes from sleep mode.

For example Madvr has a bug that can trigger a freeze when using D3D11 (native) hardware decoding. This mostly happens when doing (frequent) seeking. You can avoid that by explicitly selecting a GPU in LAV Video decoder settings (this makes it switch to D3D11 Copy-back mode). Or by using DXVA2 copyback.

When video freezes, press Ctrl+J to the video renderer statistics/debug overlay. Does that show correctly? If so, make a screenshot.

Okay, after 10 days of thorough, thorough testing, I realized the problem is with madvr.

Here's how I debugged it: For 10 days, I set Playback----- Output to: Enhanced Video Renderer.  I had tried this previously, but for some reason mpc-hc reverted back to madvr, so I thought I had Enhanced Video Renderer set, but it was actually using madvr still. Anyways, I made sure MPC was set to Enhanced Video Renderer for the whole 10 days and the problem didn't happen once.

Here's the problem exactly: When Playback--Output is set to: madVR, eventually while playing a video, the video will freeze at a frame, audio will continue to play, then after 20 or 30 seconds, it will show another frame of the video, as if it's trying to play the video, but can't. Then after a minute or two it will finally continue.

I changed a lot of settings in madVR, but there's no way to reset all the settings back to default, so there must be a madVR setting that's causing the video to freeze on a frame randomly.

I need to find out how to properly ensure madvr is set to default settings. I wish there was a button in the madvr menu that lets me quickly restore all settings to default.