Video stuttering on Mac mini M2 Pro and Sonoma 14.7.4

You also have several hard drives connected. Old drives spinning up and down can cause lag.

I would test without those drives connected to see if it makes a difference.

You have a LOT of old stuff migrated from previous macs. Some of it was of Lion 10.7 vintage.

It is no surprise that some of it does not play nice with Sequoia.

Your version of Soundflower, for example, has not worked for more than a decade now (there was a subsequent version that could have worked until maybe Catalina, but even that was long ago). This was great software, but completely obsolete for years.

Every time one moves to a new mac, it is tempting to migrate everything so you immediately "continue where you left off", but over time this accumulates a lot of cruft. At least from time to time, it is recommended to migrate ONLY the user accounts. You could do this now, and are likely to discover a much more performant Mac Mini:

1) Full backup (preferably two) 2) System Settings->General->Transfer or Reset->Erase All Content and Settings 3) Migrate ONLY your user accounts (do NOT migrate everything, otherwise you'd get back to where you started). 4) Reinstall any applications from the App Store or their developers' sites

Also, there is no reason to have MalwareBytes' real time scanner activated as that will certainly cause some degradation in system performance. Unless you believe you have a malware or adware infection, MalwareBytes is not needed at all. Same for the ProSoft software.

Most people have no need for a VPN since most consumer VPN software does not provide the privacy or security that people think they do. A VPN is only provides privacy & security when used to access an employer's network or accessing your own home network resources remotely (for the former, it usually requires the VPN software for the employer's firewall/VPN appliance).

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

Why are you running both DriveDx and SMARTUtility? You should only need one of them to monitor your drives' health. They both use the same open source utility at their core, but providing different GUI interfaces and perhaps features. Drive Genius is not needed.

Are you doing security work? If not, then why use LittleSnitch? It is known to cause some issues with macOS. Most people have no need for this software.

You have so much software installed which is running all the time. Every one of those items is going to degrade system performance. I cannot even do a good job viewing the EtreCheck report due to the amount of items listed in it. I have examined very few EtreCheck reports which have that much software which is configured to load at startup & login. There is a price to pay for running all that stuff.

I only added references to this mostly newer software in addition to the items noted by @Luis Sequeira1.

I'm actually mentally exhausted.

Scott_R wrote:

As far as SmartUtility, DriveDX said I needed to install it:

You need to install special driver to perform diagnostics of external USB drives macOS does not support diagnosing external USB/FireWire drives using S.M.A.R.T. technology "out of the box". In order to allow your Mac to diagnose external USB/FireWire drives, you will need to install a special third party driver. Please note that this is a requirement of macOS, and not DriveDx.

It then gives you and Install Driver... button, which installs SmartUtility.

I think this is the special USB driver installed by DriveDx since DriveDx by default doesn't install anything:

  /Library/Extensions
    [Not Loaded] SATSMARTDriver.kext - com.binaryfruit.driver.SATSMARTDriver (Kirill Luzanov, 0.10.3 - SDK 11)

FYI, there really is an app named SMART Utility and this EtreCheck entry appears to be it since it is associated with "Volitan" the developer:

   [Not Loaded] SMARTUtilityMenuItem (Volitans Software - installed 2023-12-11)
    Modern Login Item
    /Volumes/O*********f/D*******s/S***********y/SMART Utility.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/SMARTUtilityMenuItem.app

The thing is, everything ran just fine until a few months ago, when poof, videos slowed down.

I forgot to mention that you are a couple of updates behind for Sonoma patches. Perhaps try installing the 14.7.6 update patch to see if that makes any difference.

Also, try running Disk Utility First Aid on the hidden Container. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the hidden Container appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Even if the First Aid summary says everything is "Ok", click "Show Details" and scroll back through the report to see if any unfixed errors are listed. If there are errors, then run First Aid again until the errors are gone. If after several scans the errors remain, then try running First Aid while booted into recovery mode. If the errors still remain, then you will need to erase the disk followed by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup. FYI, if the errors are related to a backup APFS snapshot, then they should not be causing any problems and those errors will disappear once that snapshot is deleted (it will be deleted automatically at some point depending on the backup software being used....for Time Machine it is about 24-48 hours if your backup drive is connected).

Do you recall any changes to the system at the time this occurred?

Since you have sufficient Free storage space on the internal boot drive (80GB+), you can create a new APFS volume (give it a unique name) and install macOS to it.

Only install the software you need to test the videos to compare results. This is a bit better than deleting those third party apps, but not quite as good as a full clean install which erases the disk.