I mostly experience this issue while using Chrome to view videos embedded in my timeline on Facebook; I think I’ve also seen it happening on some other sites like nu.nl, but so far have been unable to reproduce this while viewing videos on YouTube mobile website for example, or in other apps (but maybe I just haven’t tried enough on other sites or apps).
Usually, the video freezes after it has been playing for a couple of seconds, while audio (and captions if enabled) continue. Pausing and restarting the video doesn’t help, but video will continue again if I open the recent apps list and then go back to the browser; see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IFHuMUdqj9xItYy9FSI5lhx4d-AxHYyB/view?usp=sharing for a video that illustrates this. Once the video has resumed using this procedure, it usually plays fine until the end, but the next video may exhibit the same issue all over again.
I’ve contacted OnePlus about this, but without any decent troubleshooting, they advised me to send in my device to get it repaired. Not sure whether that’s their standard response if something is not behaving as expected, or maybe this is a common hardware issue with these devices. If it really is a hardware issue, then I’m wondering why I don’t experience this issue with other apps for example. Maybe it’s related to the AVC codec used by Facebook, whereas YouTube for example seems to use VP9 according to ‘ADB logcat’.
Why My Video freezes in Chrome, audio and captions continue?
Obviously, I would like to be a bit more certain that this is really a hardware issue before sending in my device, so wondering whether anyone else experienced similar issues while playing videos in Chrome and whether they were able to resolve this.
So far, I’ve tried the following to no avail: rebooting the device, clearing data for Chrome, disable private DNS (to make sure ad blocking doesn’t interfere with Facebook videos).
I did try to get some more information through ADB, not sure whether this is worth anything.
While playing any video in Chrome (on any site, and whether it freezes or not), I see a lot of the following messages in ‘ADB logcat’: