choppy playback all of a sudden

[sharks17]

Hi All. I realize everything about this post is completely cliché but here goes:

Been using VLC for what seems like 20 years (though probably more like 10-15 but cant even remember anymore). I have never had a problem with VLC. Never even needed this forum. Occasionally I'd have an odd issue with playback and and it was easily solved by 1 or 2 settings.

I have a very new upper midrange PC with RTX3080 graphics card windows10. I have an UHD monitor using Display Port.

About 2 weeks ago I started having choppy playback with 4k and HD movies. About once every minute it will act like it is paused for a half a second and then resume. Very choppy very laggy almost to the point where I feel a little motion sick.

VLC has ran so solidly for so many years that my immediate reaction was that it was the files, not VLC. I have my family videos backed up on an external hard drive so I took my backup files copied them onto my HD and tried again. Same issue. I went to windows settings and made sure all windows updates were installed, checked graphics card version - that's fine, ect. Back to VLC reset all settings. Same issue. Uninstalled, reinstalled. Same issue. I even took an old hard drive that I was using only as an archive for my side bookkeeping business, put that back into my PC booted windows from it, installed latest version of VLC and BAH! Same issue! <facepalm>

On a whim I played the same moves with windows movie player and to my surprise they played just fine... zero problems...

I have tried just about every common fix for this that I could find in google searches and so far absolutely nothing has worked. I am completely at a loss here. Is it possible something broke in an update to VLC recently? Thanks much for any ideas anyone can pass along.

[Lotesdelere]

Reset the preferences (the manual way) and try again:
https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:ResetPrefs