Why did PotPlayer cause my laptop to freeze?

[cns00]

I started using PotPlayer on my laptop on around Oct 2023. I watched maybe 1000 movies by using PotPlayer until June 29 and there were no issues.

I watched a movie by using PotPlayer on the morning of June 29 and it was ok. I watched a movie by using PotPlayer in the afternoon and suddenly my laptop froze and it made an annoying sound because it got stuck while playing the movie so I had to do force shut down.

I did research on PotPlayer freezing the computer. I found:
1) https://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/213874-potplayer-causes-windows-10-freeze.html
2) https://www.reddit.com/r/potplayer/comments/10zs6ru/version_230207_freezes_my_laptop_be_careful/

I think that the people who got the freezing in the first link were using external video codecs. I never installed any external video codec packs. The person who got the freezing in the second link got the freezing just after installing a new version of PotPlayer. I didn't install a new version and I was using an old version for like 5 months.

It's a fact that PotPlayer can cause your computer to freeze because that has happened to multiple people. However, why did my PotPlayer suddenly decide to misbehave and cause my laptop to freeze? I haven't modified anything in my laptop. I didn't do any Windows updates and I didn't update any drivers and I only updated the Nvidia driver a few months ago.

I uninstalled PotPlayer on June 29 and I installed another media player and I tested the same movie that I was watching by using PotPlayer when it froze. The movie worked ok in the other media player. I watched more movies by using the other media player and there were no issues.

I think that PotPlayer has a bug which can cause some computers to freeze but is it normal that the bug suddenly decides to cause problems after 5 months of me using the same old version?

[Schwartz]

Could be a bug in a driver, could be an aging GPU, could be a bad drive, as drive issues can manifest as a frozen screen too. A single freeze during a hardware accelerated operation really is no grounds to say it's PotPlayer's fault and you really can't do much except use a different player for a couple months and see if it happens again.

[Emulgator]

Additionally you may type eventvwr.msc into Run window and go through Windows protocols.
From Win10 on drivers and system components may be force-updated, and no way to escape.
Such incompatibilities led to some programs bluescreening on closing here.

[FranceBB]

From my experience with PotPlayer on Windows, it's almost definitely the hardware acceleration.
I don't know if it's related to a driver update or Windows update, but it's almost definitely an hardware decoding issue.
You see, the OS goes through a great deal of effort to avoid precisely this, so much so that all programs run "safely" in userspace (i.e they can't crash your entire system).
On the other hand, drivers need to interact with the actual hardware and run in kernel space, so if an error happens there, it's game over, the OS can't recover and you see exactly what you experienced.
I've experienced those kind of freezes myself, with the audio that kept playing / circling back the last second indefinitely until you shut the PC down the hard way, but ever since I switched to software decoding, nothing happened.
It's not ideal, but I found out that software decoding is waaaaaaaaay safer.
Anyway, to put it simply, it's not PotPlayer's fault per se. If you turn hardware decoding off, you won't see the crash, I can guarantee it, but of course it will use the CPU, so you need a lot of CPU power to decode things.

[huhn]

a PC freeze is unusual for a hardware decoding issue. the usual result is a driver crash followed by a driver restart which is consider in win 10 and older as an error and just a warning in win 11.

should be a 4101 if i remember correctly will check later with ay AMD system that did this constantly in the past.