No one likes choppy, jerky, or skipping videos when they press play. But many don’t know why it’s happening. Let’s find out the reasons behind these issues that made your video laggy or stuttering.
What Causes Choppy Video Playback?
When your video is out-of-sync video or audio, missing audio, flickering or distorted visuals due to:
- Faulty Storage devices ( Hard drive, SSD, SD card, USB).
- Device glitch.
- Outdated media players.
- Incompatible video file format.
- Large video files
- Audio / Video codec issues.
- Corrupt video file.
- Outdated device drivers
So we know what made your video file choppy, now let’s jump straight to fix them.
10 Solutions To Choppy Video Playback Issue
Let us start from the basic to advanced solutions that can fix your choppy video:
BASIC
1: Restart your Device
Simply restart your device to resolve temporary glitches that cause jerky video playback. A restart can clear up the temporary files and cache and close all the background applications to provide smooth playback.
2: Update or Try a Different Media Player
Update the media player and try playing the video player to play the video file, Make sure you choose a video player like VLC or KMPlayer that has wide codec support and uses your system resources to keep up with the playback. Additionally, these media players have advanced features like
NOTE: Ensure that you download from the official site to avoid malware and viruses that could harm the device.
3: Check Device Compatibility
If you are trying to stream a UHD video with high resolution that requires a lot of memory and processing. When the device doesn’t meet the requirements, the device struggles to keep up and ends up producing a choppy video.
To view your System Requirements: This PC > Right-Click > Properties.
Check if your system meets the video playback requirements. If not, try another device. If it does and still produces choppy video, move on to the next solution.
INTERMEDIATE
4: Re-Download Your Videos
Interruptions like poor internet or an error while downloading the video can often result in a corrupt video file or incomplete video. Even if the video file looks complete when you play an incomplete file, your device will try to interpret the missing data, leading to choppiness, stuttering, or playback errors.
Download the video again from the source to get a complete video file without any video skipping or stuttering.
5: Update Drivers
Updating the display/ Graphics driver will often bug fixes and performance optimizations and Newer drivers will resolve the compatibility issues between the driver and the video to result in a smooth video playback.
Here’s How you do it:
- Open Device Manager and Expand Display adapters.
- Right-click on the drive and choose Update.
- Now click on Search Automatically for drivers.
6: Clear your Browser Cache
In the case of choppy video streaming, try clearing your browser cache to remove all the temporary files causing choppy videos.
Here is how you can clear the cache and temporary files on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge:
Press Ctrl + H > Click on Clear Browsing data(Chrome) or Trash Icon(Microsoft Edge) > Choose the Time Range and clear the data.
7: Video Playback Troubleshooter
Windows 10/11 features a built-in troubleshooting tool designed to identify and potentially resolve common video playback issues such as codec problems, incorrect settings, or outdated software.
The user-friendly interface makes it easy to run the troubleshooter, which could effectively fix the playback issues.
- Search for “troubleshoot” in the Windows search bar and open Troubleshoot settings from the search results.
- Click on Additional Troubleshooters.
- Scroll down to find Video Playback and click on it. Then, click on Run the troubleshooter.
Follow the instructions to finish troubleshooting. Then, check if the jerky video playback issues are fixed.
ADVANCED
8: Reduce Video Resolution
Scale down the video file from higher resolutions can bring down the workload making it easier for the hardware to handle the playback.
For Online streaming services like YouTube or Netflix, click on the settings Icon and reduce the video quality.
For Offline videos, You can choose any video compressor tools like Clideo or FreeConvert else you can do it using VLC.
- Open VLC and click on Convert/Save.
- Click on Add to select the video file and click on Convert/Save.
- Click on the Wrench Icon, Go to the Video Codec tab, and go to Resolution
- Now set the resolution next to Width and Height and click on Save.
- Click on Browse to choose a location for the new video file and click on Start.
Once the process is completed, now go to the destination play the video file, and observe any frame drops, video lag, and audio sync issues.
9: Convert the Video File Format
When your video is of an unusual format or incompatible with the device/ Media player simply convert it to a more common format like MP4 with H.264 codec can fix the choppy video playback issue.
Remember: There will be a video-quality loss, depending on the format you are going to choose.
For conversion, you can choose any online video converter tool like FreeConvert, CloudConvert, or Zamzar for better results.
10: Repair Corrupt Video File
At this point, we assume your video file could be damaged or corrupted which is why the video file could be stuttering or audio-video sync issue, or be pixelated.
The video file corruption could be due to either a bad sector in your storage device, virus attacks, etc. Irrespective of the reasons behind video corruption you can choose a reliable video repair tool to fix the choppy video file.
We recommend using Yodot VIdeo Repair to fix the corrupt video file to fix choppy video playback on various popular video formats like MP4, AVI, MOV, MKVetc in 3 simple clicks.
Download the Yodot Video Repair tool on your computer and follow the steps below:
Step 1: Launch the Yodot Video Repair tool and click on Select File to choose the choppy video file.
Step 2: Click on Repair to start the video repair process.
Step 3: After the completion, preview the repaired video file and save it on your device.
NOTE: Save the repaired video file in a new location to prevent the risk of further corruption issues.
Suggestion to Avoid Choppy Video Playback
- Always use popular video formats like MP4 and MOV to prevent compatibility issues.
- Keep your device, media players, and display drivers updated to get the best performance.
- For online streaming, ensure you have a stable internet connection and enough free space to prevent choppy playback issues.
- Scan your device using an updated antivirus tool to protect your video files from virus attacks.
Also Read: How to fix Bad quality videos?
Conclusion
As we mentioned earlier, choppy videos can spoil the viewing experience. We hope the solutions listed above, ranging from basic to advanced, have helped you resolve those playback issues.
We often receive user queries where video corruption causes choppy playback. In such cases, we recommend using an effective video repair tool like Yodot Video Repair to restore smooth playback.
