Media Players Freeze When Skipping Forward – macOS Monterey on MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2015)

Hi everyone,

I’ve been experiencing a persistent issue on my MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2015) running macOS Monterey 12.7.6.

Every time I try to skip forward while playing a video in any media player — including VLC and Elmedia Player — the application freezes and becomes unresponsive, forcing me to quit it manually.

System Specs:

• macOS Monterey 12.7.6 (latest update)
• MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2015)
• Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
• Graphics: Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

This happens regardless of video file format (MP4, MKV, AVI) and across different resolutions. I've already tried:

• Reinstalling the players
• Resetting VLC preferences
• Disabling hardware acceleration in both VLC and Elmedia Player
• Running in Safe Mode

Nothing seems to resolve the freezing when I seek or skip forward during playback. The issue doesn't appear to be file-specific and occurs consistently.

Has anyone else experienced this on Monterey with this Mac model? Could this be a GPU driver issue or something deeper in macOS video frameworks? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!