help with videos

[essaynnc]

When I play videos here on DU on my android phone, they start fine, sound is good, but after a few seconds, the image changes to unintelligible horizontal / diagonal lines. The sound is still fine, but I can't see the video. I've tried changing the Quality, no difference.

It's only some videos, but I can't determine what kind work and which ones will exhibit the problem.

I've recently found that I can go to Full-screen and it plays fine.

Any ideas what might be causing this, and more importantly, remedies??

thanks in advance.

[CloudWatcher]

1. Generic suggestion

Well I hate to see a query go completely unanswered, so I'll chime in with some generic advice.

I've seen similar symptoms (video playback corruption) on many devices over the years ... (not Android, I don't actually use many of those).

The corruption is usually due to some combination of hardware/software glitches that disappear when I power cycle the device.

I.e. when you see this happening, I'd suggest a full power-off and then power-on sequence. Not just a "screen-lock" ... but actually fully powering off the device.

The power-on will reset the hardware, and the software reboot will reset (most of) the software.

If that doesn't help, then I'd start trying different browsers. E.g. try both Chrome and Firefox and see if the problem is specific to one of them.

Of course updating your software (OS and browser) to the most recent is usually a good idea too.

If nothing helps, you might really have bad hardware. I've seen similar display problems when the graphics chip has failing memory or there is a more serious hardware issue.

Good luck!

[essaynnc]

2. Thank you for the advice.

I've tried power off/ on a number of times; the problem persists.

I just found out recently that if I go to full screen mode, the videos play as normal, but back to small screen, NFG.

I had this issue some time ago, and after some months I noticed that it had fixed itself. Now here it is 6 months down the road, and the problem is back. Since it isn't too much of a hassle, or life threatening in any way, i think that I'll just see if it fixes itself again.

Perhaps like you said, it's a component that's on the edge of failing.

Once again, thanks for responding!!!!

Steve

[CloudWatcher]

3. Maybe test with different browsers

You might still have some luck testing with different browsers. That would test not just different code (for some of the video playback path), but the two browsers would have different sets of cache files. So if there's something wrong in a cache file, switching browsers would be a quick test to walk around the problem

Ah then ... if it was specific to your current browser, the next step would be to figure out how to clear its cache files and see if that helps.

In any event, glad to hear you have a workaround!

Cheers!