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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 prob...
Answer
#1: Initial revision
by
matthewsnyderâ€
·
2024-03-04T16:13:01Z (about 2 months ago)
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.