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Browser video sometimes stops working; how can I figure out why?
I leave my Mac (Mini, not laptop) running all the time, only rebooting when something forces me to (like a software update). My uptimes are usually measured in weeks, sometimes months.
Occasionally, browser-based streaming video (Youtube, Google Hangouts) will stop working, in all browsers, though everything else is fine. I can't correlate it to anything. This has happened under my current OS (12.2.1, Monterey), most recently last night, but it also happened under 11.6 (Big Sur) and 10.12 (Sierra -- that one was on different hardware).
When this happens it affects all browsers. It happened today and I checked Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Brave (all up to date except Safari) -- same behavior. Rebooting fixes the problem.
I've already rebooted after today's problem (needed the video), but for next time this happens: what diagnostics might I be able to perform? Or is this a known problem with a known solution?
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I noticed a random lagginess and/or freezing in my browsers from time to time. After carefully switching off and on all plugins and things related to the network I found out it was the Apple Private Relay security service that come with my iCloud subscription, since I disabled it browsing and streaming has become smooth and stable.
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As an alternative to rebooting, you might try to use "Force Quit Applicaitons" (Command-Option-Escape), select one web browser then click Force Quit. If there was another web browser in the list, repeat until there isn't any web browser.
You could use the Activity Monitor if you still want to go deep. For details for macOS Ventura, see Activity Monitor User Guide.
Hint: Try to find memory leaks.
Reference
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Does the Mac Mini have a GPU? This sounds like something that could happen due to a graphics driver issue.
AFAIK Youtube relies on the HTML5 video element. If it freezes in all browsers, it's probably not a browser problem. Nevertheless, most browsers (eg. Firefox) have a "Safe Mode" which starts the browser with a basic configuration, plugins disabled, and so on. This might be worth trying. You didn't mention restarting the browser, but since all the browsers freeze it seems beside the point. Also, check if there's a "hardware acceleration" setting and if disabling it helps.
Try to download one of the videos with Invidious or a tool like youtube-dl. See if they run from the hard drive, with QuickTime or mpv. If that freezes too it is definitely not a browser problem.
Incidentally, mpv can stream from Youtube directly. The command is mpv https://www.youtube.com/.... That would be another thing to try, and it would interrogate network issues as a suspect.
Lastly, try creating your own HTML file that points to a local video and seeing what that does. Maybe something like:
<body>
<video controls>
<source src="/Users/monica/movie.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>
<body/
You can open this file in a browser (File -> Open) and it should play the video same as Youtube does, but without any network requests involved. If it's really a video driver issue, this should also freeze.
If you do discover that it's a driver issue, there will not be much you can do. Essentially you will have to wait for Apple to publish an update, which may be after some months or years. I'm not sure if there's an easy way on Macs to downgrade to older driver versions, nor am I aware of an easy way to swap GPUs.
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