Website videos black / dark for first few seconds – FIXED

This has been annoying me for ages… When I say ages, I mean 6 months or more. When I start to watch a video in Chrome on a website like YouTube or BBC News, the first few seconds of the video are dark and pixellated. I’ve tried new video drivers and other setting changes but none have worked until now.

This first image shows what a video looks like when it starts to run in Chrome.

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When I realised that the same videos played well in Internet Explorer, Edge and Firefox, I decided that it had to be one of the Chrome settings. After some trial and error, I discovered this flag:
chrome://flags/#disable-accelerated-video-decode  .

I disabled this which means that Chrome wasn’t trying to use hardware acceleration on my graphics card. This fixed my problem.
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After disabling hardware acceleration, my videos are clear, right from the first second of replay – a great improvement.