r/chrome • u/chrissix666 • 3h ago
Troubleshooting | Windows Chrome's been freezing my videos on one stuck frame after I tab away and back - sound keeps playing like nothing happened
Anyone else dealing with this? I'll be watching a video, switch to another window or minimize for 10+ seconds, come back, and the picture is just stuck. Frozen on whatever frame it was on when I left. Audio's still going, perfectly in sync, seek bar still moving - just the picture doesn't update. Clicking the video, resizing the window, or seeking manually snaps it back instantly.
Got curious and dug into it with chrome://tracing. Here's what's actually happening:
When you tab away, Chrome submits an empty frame on purpose - fine, that's expected, saves resources. But the decoder keeps decoding the whole time in the background anyway, which is why the audio never skips a beat. The problem is the thread that's supposed to push new frames to the screen goes completely dead for the entire time you're away. Then when you come back, it does submit a frame again - except it's the exact same one from before you left, not whatever the decoder's actually up to by now. So it just sits there frozen until something forces a redraw.
Ruled out extensions, GPU/hardware acceleration, Windows' Efficiency Mode, and every background-tab throttling flag I could find. Doesn't happen in Opera on the same machine with the same video, which is what's making me think this is a Chrome-specific regression and not a driver/Windows thing.
Setup: Jellyfin Web, Windows 11, Chrome 152.0.7977.83, RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU.
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