video repeats 0.5 seconds (equiv to about four letters in dialogue) every 60 seconds. This occurs with VLC and MediaPlayer apps. Does this even with VLC Portable running in Wine. Using Toshiba Laptop 650C 2.2 MHz 4_G ram on Linux 18.1 Cinn. As test I ran 17.3 off USB stick and even then it does same. Computer worked flawlessly on 17.3 but switch to 18.1 has this problem and this problem alone.

Hi William,

Welcome to LQ!

You problem is probably the video driver. Give me the output of

what video? where does it come from? internet, hard drive?
have you tested with more than 1 video, variating the above?

that's weird, an upgrade cannot break how a previously created usb works. makes me think it has nothing to do with software.

The videos were downloaded from youtube and repeat every 60 seconds as I said but it is not only recently downloaded ones that do this, vieos I have saved from earlier downloads (and that didn't repoeat with linux 17.3) also repeat. Even MKV, webm, flv all repeat. I have taken note of the locations where the repeat occurs, stopped the video, scrolled back a couple of minutes and find the video does not repeat at that location any longer, it repeats at a different location. Videos on main HD repeat and videos on USB repeat and videos on external drive repeat. I tried changing to Linux Mate 17.04 and problems persist so went back to cinn 18.1.

have you tried running one through maybe handbrake to clean it up first then try it?

interesting.
it is clearly not the videos themselves then.
and are you saying that it now happens on ALL Linux mint versions you run on this machine?

in any case, we are willing to help, but you still haven't provided the output requested in post #2.
actually, i would like you to provide the output of this command instead:
additionally, please install a media player like mplayer (probably already installed), use it from a terminal to start a video, like this:
wait until it skips and show us the output of that.
if it doesn't output anything during the skip, increase verbosity!
like this:until you get some output at the moment the skip happens.

thank you all for your attempts at helping my problem. It's not resolved yet but you have given me some avenues to try. Am only able to connect to Internet once or twice per month (I know, in this day and age and all!) so my response is a lot slower than you may expect.Thank you for your consideration and patience.