Lost audio sync on videos and it's driving me nuts.

21stCentury

So today, i noticed videos (youtube, streams etc.) no longer have proper audio syncing up. I tried rebooting my computer, i tried turning off hardware acceleration on chrome, no dice. so far the hardware acceleration thing keeps coming up when googling the issue.

Anyone had that happen to them? how can it be fixed?

Thanks in advance!

Hahnsoo1

How are you routing your sound? Is it through your laptop/desktop's built-in audio or through a USB dongle or what? Realtek audio drivers are known to be total shit, and sometimes this problem can be fixed by deleting the Realtek drivers and replacing them with a generic audio driver instead.
https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-realtek-audio-delay-lag/

You can also just plug in a USB audio dongle and route audio through that. Most of the time, that clears up the audio lag.

Also, try reverting back your video card drivers. Often, video card drivers include an HDMI audio component, which can cause audio lag for some goddamn reason.

21stCentury

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

How are you routing your sound? Is it through your laptop/desktop's built-in audio or through a USB dongle or what? Realtek audio drivers are known to be total shit, and sometimes this problem can be fixed by deleting the Realtek drivers and replacing them with a generic audio driver instead.
https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-realtek-audio-delay-lag/

You can also just plug in a USB audio dongle and route audio through that. Most of the time, that clears up the audio lag.

Also, try reverting back your video card drivers. Often, video card drivers include an HDMI audio component, which can cause audio lag for some goddamn reason.

I have a set of speakers plugged in using the 3.5mm jack.

Also it stopped happening as soon as i complained so.... I have no idea what happened.

Steev

I recently solved, or hope I solved, a similar issue on my PC that I'd been dealing with for 3 years. And it did indeed involve replacing the Realtek drivers.

That being said, the issue came back in the last few days. I did have a Windows update recently, so I suspect that might have caused the driver to switch back to Realtek or something. I reinstalled the driver and things seem to be going OK again.

I will say that this problem was driving me crazy because it was intermittent and I never knew when it was going to crop up.

SanderJK

Realtek does an infuriating thing where their drivers are in Windows Updates now. They will install to the newest version whenever connected to the internet.

If there is something wrong with the newest driver, it may involve a fight with the Windows Updates system as a whole which really, really dislikes being turned off.

I gave up when my newest Realtek driver for my mobo removed all microphone settings on my headset after a weekend of safe mode fighting about a year ago.

Shadowfire

SanderJK wrote: »

Realtek does an infuriating thing where their drivers are in Windows Updates now. They will install to the newest version whenever connected to the internet.

If there is something wrong with the newest driver, it may involve a fight with the Windows Updates system as a whole which really, really dislikes being turned off.

I gave up when my newest Realtek driver for my mobo removed all microphone settings on my headset after a weekend of safe mode fighting about a year ago.

If you roll the driver back, it will usually ask you why you're doing it. Selecting the option that's along the lines of "this update broke something" will usually suspend that update for a month or two.

21stCentury

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

How are you routing your sound? Is it through your laptop/desktop's built-in audio or through a USB dongle or what? Realtek audio drivers are known to be total shit, and sometimes this problem can be fixed by deleting the Realtek drivers and replacing them with a generic audio driver instead.
https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-realtek-audio-delay-lag/

You can also just plug in a USB audio dongle and route audio through that. Most of the time, that clears up the audio lag.

Also, try reverting back your video card drivers. Often, video card drivers include an HDMI audio component, which can cause audio lag for some goddamn reason.

@Hahnsoo1

It started doing it again so i checked your link....

I don't think i have Realtek Audio though?



That's what my list looks like.... am i shit out of luck?

Hahnsoo1

I'd still try uninstalling those drivers and re-installing them (along with the NVIDIA HD Audio) and see what happens.

21stCentury

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

I'd still try uninstalling those drivers and re-installing them (along with the NVIDIA HD Audio) and see what happens.

I tried that and it seemed to work but it's happening again.

tastydonuts

have you tried disabling hardware acceleration for the device, not just chrome?

21stCentury

tastydonuts wrote: »

have you tried disabling hardware acceleration for the device, not just chrome?

I couldn't figure out how to do that.

21stCentury

I don't understand why it started happening all of a sudden. I've had this PC for months with no issues.

discrider

..
A while ago one of my hardware clocks started arguing with the other, which would cause animations and other things to complete slower and out of sync with music.
Had to disable one of the clocks.

Will need to search the forum though.

discrider

discrider wrote: »

So it looks like my multiple cores on my PC have some sort of timer drift.

In any case, running this command "bcdedit /set {default} useplatformclock true" in my Windows 7 cmd prompt fixed it (after a restart).
So now my challenge music matches the timer.

As far as I can tell, the core clock was running slower than the motherboard clock and causing music to run faster than animations, due to two different underlying timing procedures/calls.
I don't think it was causing any desync with like YouTube videos or the like though.

21stCentury

i'll try that out. Thanks!

Edit: A bit wary of messing with that now, can you let me know HOW you found it out?

discrider

A bit of this:


I mean, I had a very specific problem that I couldn't find the answer to, until I had trawled the web to find it.
So it might not be your problem, but it was the answer to mine

At that point, I'd seen the desync in multiple programs (The Witness, as previously, and Team Fortress 2, where taunt animations were running slow and over-ran when people we otherwise acting as if they were no longer locked into the animation), so it was happening at OS level or lower (hardware).
So maybe check whether it's happening in multiple programs first.

21stCentury

discrider wrote: »

A bit of this:


I mean, I had a very specific problem that I couldn't find the answer to, until I had trawled the web to find it.
So it might not be your problem, but it was the answer to mine

At that point, I'd seen the desync in multiple programs (The Witness, as previously, and Team Fortress 2, where taunt animations were running slow and over-ran when people we otherwise acting as if they were no longer locked into the animation), so it was happening at OS level or lower (hardware).
So maybe check that first.

OK, no, it only does it for streaming videos (Youtube and others). Games and other programs work fine with no delay. Probably not the same issue.

Also I regret to inform you things are worse than ever, video is about a second slower than the sound after 30 seconds of runtime. trying to mess with drivers no longer has any effect (It used to reset the sync and stick for a good while.)

SO I don't think it's hardware acceleration on Chrome, it affects both Chrome and Firefox, also affects video playback in Media players.

I mean,, maybe i should try your solution, Discrider, but... messing with stuff at the deep level kinda scares me. I don't want to brick my PC, since i need it to work.

discrider

So, I don't believe the command can brick your PC.
It's just telling your computer to use the motherboard clock for all timing, instead of going to the core clock.
And it's only changing a flag that you can reverse easily with 'false' instead of 'true'.

But you could also post your question in the tech tavern before jumping to bcedit too:
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/categories/moes-stupid-technology-tavern

discrider

I guess it could be a problematic codec?
The program that translates the stream of data into video?
That might be shared between browsers and could conceivably desync video from audio at a wild guess.
And might be replaced on video driver installation.

No idea how to diagnose or fix that though.

21stCentury

To anyone reading this, I tried restarting the BITS (background intelligent transfer service) service

Type services.msc in the Start menu search box and then click ok.

Right-click background intelligent transfer service, and then click properties.

On the general tab in the startup type box, click Automatic, and then click apply.

In the service status section of the properties dialog box, verify that the BITS service is started. if it is not started, click start.

Click apply, and then click ok.

It seeeeeeems to have solved the thing!

MAYBE?

i'm hoping!

EDIT: Nope, it greatly lessened the drift but didn't solve it.... i don't lose hope though.

Hahnsoo1

Have you checked your DPC Latency through Latency Mon or a similar program while streaming a youtube video yet?

21stCentury

After rebooting, updating windows and all that it's..... well, it appears fixed again.

fingers crossed this time.

21stCentury

took a few weeks but the problem is back.

Sighhhhhhhh

ReaperSMS

Do you have freesync/gsync enabled? This is something that kicked in on my machine. One window would be synced, the rest wouldn't.

If the video syncs while the window is in focus, that might be it.

21stCentury

ReaperSMS wrote: »

Do you have freesync/gsync enabled? This is something that kicked in on my machine. One window would be synced, the rest wouldn't.

If the video syncs while the window is in focus, that might be it.

i don't know what freesync/gsync is or how to confirm it beign enabled or not.

21stCentury

Naheed wrote: »

If the problem is only with youtube audio, go to the crome, then click on advance in
crome settings > Content Settings > Sound. You will see youtube in the list of mute.
You need to remove youtube from that list and check if it solves your problem.

It's with all streaming content on all browsers, as well as video files on my pc. it's global.

Hahnsoo1

Have you checked your DPC Latency through Latency Mon or a similar program while streaming a youtube video yet?

I'd look into the above and see if there's something weird going on.

Also, I saw this One Weird Trick:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/video-slowly-loses-sync-with-audio.3302799/page-2?view=date
Not sure why disabling Fast Boot fixes the issue, though.

Flags to disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome:
https://support.ipconfigure.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023105331-Disabling-GPU-accelerated-video-decoding-in-Chrome-for-improved-performance

It could also be that your audio is actually doing fine, and it's something weird going on with your streaming video.

Otherwise, I would buy a cheap USB audio dongle and see if that solves your problem. Could be something janky with your onboard sound and drivers. A Sabrent USB audio adapter is around $8 (USD) (probably a little more in Canadian dollars, but not much more).

21stCentury

I took a look at Latency Mon and i can't really comprehend that.

Also, what's a "USB Audio Dongle"? What does it do, what is it for?

Hahnsoo1

21stCentury wrote: »

I took a look at Latency Mon and i can't really comprehend that.

Yeah, it takes a couple of tutorials and some reading to figure it out, but the short version is that long red bars are bad.

Also, what's a "USB Audio Dongle"? What does it do, what is it for?

It’s a device the size of a USB thumb drive with a headphone jack and usually a mic jack. It’s basically an external audio card that you plug into a USB port. Cheaper than a DAC or an audio interface, usually (again, a Sabrent USB audio thing is 8 USD).

It used to be that a lot of old headsets came with a dongle like that to plug into USB, so they can masquerade as a USB headset in addition to a typical 3.5mm TRS or TRRS headset.

21stCentury

@Hahnsoo1 I tried disabling Fastboot this time only to find out it's already disabled. Next time it happens i'll use Latency mon. I don't think it's an audio thing though since it takes several hours before the desync is noticeable at all. If it were straight up my audio card on the motherboard, wouldn't it always be desynchronized?

Shadowfire

21stCentury wrote: »

@Hahnsoo1 I tried disabling Fastboot this time only to find out it's already disabled. Next time it happens i'll use Latency mon. I don't think it's an audio thing though since it takes several hours before the desync is noticeable at all. If it were straight up my audio card on the motherboard, wouldn't it always be desynchronized?

Make sure hibernate is disabled too. In an admin cmd or powershell type powercfg -h off. It's supposed to make your computer boot faster and usually does, but sometimes it keeps settings that are goofy and mess with windows.

TelMarine

Have you tried rolling back or updating your graphics card drivers? I remember when I started having video issues a couple times I had to roll back my graphics card driver, sometimes going back like a year.

21stCentury

@Hahnsoo1

Started happening again, this is what i got from LatencyMon



I guess i'll look into CPU Throttling, would that be in, like overclock settings?

Hahnsoo1

21stCentury wrote: »

Hahnsoo1

Started happening again, this is what i got from LatencyMon



I guess i'll look into CPU Throttling, would that be in, like overclock settings?

First, check for Power Throttling in WIndows 10:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-power-throttling-windows-10

But yeah, you'd check it out in the BIOS, typically. It varies based on BIOS, but usually it's under Advanced CPU Settings or Power Management settings. Something like Energy Efficient Turbo (turn this off) and other settings like it.

21stCentury

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

21stCentury wrote: »

Hahnsoo1

Started happening again, this is what i got from LatencyMon



I guess i'll look into CPU Throttling, would that be in, like overclock settings?

First, check for Power Throttling in WIndows 10:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-power-throttling-windows-10

But yeah, you'd check it out in the BIOS, typically. It varies based on BIOS, but usually it's under Advanced CPU Settings or Power Management settings. Something like Energy Efficient Turbo (turn this off) and other settings like it.

@Hahnsoo1 , you son of a classy lady... i think that did it. didn't even need to reboot.

Quick question: Will that affect anything in the long run?

Hahnsoo1

21stCentury wrote: »

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

21stCentury wrote: »

Hahnsoo1

Started happening again, this is what i got from LatencyMon



I guess i'll look into CPU Throttling, would that be in, like overclock settings?

First, check for Power Throttling in WIndows 10:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-power-throttling-windows-10

But yeah, you'd check it out in the BIOS, typically. It varies based on BIOS, but usually it's under Advanced CPU Settings or Power Management settings. Something like Energy Efficient Turbo (turn this off) and other settings like it.

Hahnsoo1 , you son of a classy lady... i think that did it. didn't even need to reboot.

Quick question: Will that affect anything in the long run?

Well... give it a few days. You said that it starts getting bad after some time?

In the long run, not in the slightest. It's designed to save power for, like, battery-powered laptops.

21stCentury

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

21stCentury wrote: »

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

21stCentury wrote: »

Hahnsoo1

Started happening again, this is what i got from LatencyMon



I guess i'll look into CPU Throttling, would that be in, like overclock settings?

First, check for Power Throttling in WIndows 10:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-manage-power-throttling-windows-10

But yeah, you'd check it out in the BIOS, typically. It varies based on BIOS, but usually it's under Advanced CPU Settings or Power Management settings. Something like Energy Efficient Turbo (turn this off) and other settings like it.

Hahnsoo1 , you son of a classy lady... i think that did it. didn't even need to reboot.

Quick question: Will that affect anything in the long run?

Well... give it a few days. You said that it starts getting bad after some time?

In the long run, not in the slightest. It's designed to save power for, like, battery-powered laptops.

damnit, you're right. it's a bit wonky again.

i'll look into the BIOS options later.

EDIT: Ok, now it's actually a lot worse than it ever was. :[

21stCentury

@Hahnsoo1

Didn't find any "energy efficient turbo" or similar in my bios settings. there was one thing that seemed similar but it was disabled already.

Rebooting did fix the issue as usual so i'll update this if it's broken again.

21stCentury

And it's happening again. I get the same message from LatencyMon... Starting to feel out of options here. I have no clue how to disable CP Throttling in BIOS because it seems already disabled when i check.

Anyone else have ideas on how to resolve this?

Also, could it be related to Remote Desktop? Feels like this didn't happen before I started working from home.

21stCentury

takes about 4-5 days between a reboot and the thing happening. at least it's not that hard to reset but it's annoying.

Steev

21stCentury wrote: »

takes about 4-5 days between a reboot and the thing happening. at least it's not that hard to reset but it's annoying.

It's crazy how there doesn't seem to be a simple solution to this shit. I get it less often than I used to, but it still happens on occasion.