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Related, when I play H.265 videos on Windows 10/NVIDIA 10 series card the player app crashes after 4-5 seek operations. I assume it's video card related, but it has up to date drivers.

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Hardware decoders in general are very untrustworthy, to the point that browsers go to great lengths to handle decoder crashes and recover from them - if your hardware decoder crashes enough Firefox will quietly switch to software decoding where possible

It depends on how the players offload the files. Some players can offload it to GPU (if it have specific format hardware decoding support), some use the CPU to do the processing. Check your player setting and see which one it is using. My MPC-BE player will tell me if the player is using the GPU to decode.

And at the same time, it depends on if the file have 8-bits or 10-bits. Some CPU/GPU don't have the support for 10-bits which can offload it to the software decoding which can be resource intensive for your system to decode the file at the software level.

But if I understand you correctly, only the player, not Windows entirely?

Yes, only the player app, Windows remains stable. Still very annoying.

I mean... have you tried another video player?

Yes, they all crash, which is why I suspect the video card. I could disable hardware decoding, but H.265 is pretty heavy on the CPU.

How old is your CPU? Age can be factor of it, it is possible that it didn't have the hardware to support it. I disabled the GPU acceleration in my player and put the CPU to work, it handles the HEVC 10-bits just fine floating around 20% of usage for this video (Intel Core i7-8559U).

If you said it is pretty heavy on the CPU, then it could be your CPU that is causing the issue.

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