HP Pavilion 15-eh0xxx videos freezing

[mhlikescars]

Hi 

I got the above laptop new about 2 years ago, and from day one it had issues where when I try to watch a video, regardless of whether I was streaming online or playing a video saved to the hard drive, the video would freeze, but sound continues, at the time I tried to return it, however the supplier told me to contact HP, and unfortunately I got no help from HP, I'd get a response after a couple of weeks asking if I still needed help, I'd say yes and then nothing again until the message asking if I still needed help, I gave up eventually and went back to my trusty old Dell laptop (I'd just bought this as an upgrade), sadly the trusty old Dell no longer charges after many years of service, and I've returned to this HP laptop rather than buying another (hopefully). 

The laptop is fully up to date(it unsurprisingly did a lot of updates after nearly 2 years in a drawer) I've checked everything to see if there's a driver update somewhere that may help, but everything shows as up to date. I've looked at the video playback settings but there's nothing obvious that I think would cause issues, and with some trial and error in the settings I've had no luck.

Although the issues can occur with any video regardless of quality, it's guaranteed to do it if the video is 60FPS, very rarely happens on videos lower than 60FPS. What happens is the video stops completely for about 5 seconds, then starts again for a just a frame or two before stopping again,  this is then how the video will play, the audio continues throughout without issue, possibly worth mentioning the laptop itself doesn't freeze, only the video. I've tried different browsers, and for local videos different video playback software, but I get the same result every time. I did wonder if the laptop just isn't compatible with 60FPS, but that trusty Dell had no issues with 60FPS and that laptop must have been at least 6-7 years old, and was a really cheap one when new, so that can't be it.

I'm pretty baffled by this, the general performance of the laptop is great, everything loads really fast, Google Maps for example is really fast in loading imagery, it's just video playback that's an issue, the laptop seems very good in every other way, so I'm hoping there might be a fix for it.  I did look to see if there was others with the same issue as me, but unless I missed them, I couldn't see any. 

Many Thanks