I have an interesting issue where my video player(s) may or may not be having a conflict with Radeon software. I'm hoping for some advice.

Okay, so I use both VLC and MPC (Media Player Classic) frequently to watch videos I've downloaded. I've used both of these programs for years with no issues.

As far as I know both of these programs have all of the playback codecs baked into the software, which means I haven't had to installed any codec separately to get them to play certain videos and audio files.

What has been happening over the last 3 or 4 months or so is that every now and then, when playing a video, it will freeze for a few seconds, the screen will go black, the program window will minimize, and then about 10-15 seconds later, the video resumes playback as if nothing ever happened.

The reason I suspect it might be conflicting with the Radeon software is because every time that this happens during video playback, and when the video finally resumes after the freakout, I notice that there are 2 or 3 extra Radeon Software icons showing up in my taskbar. After another 5 or 10 seconds, the icons disappear except for the one that is normally always there.

I've opened up the Radeon Software to see if there is anything enabled that might be causing this but, for the life of me, I can't seem to find any reason for this conflict. I'm basically running just vanilla Radeon install with all of the bells and whistles turned off or disabled, and my profile is set to "normal" mode.

I normally run version 20.2.2 of the driver/software because they seem to be the most stable for me, but I installed the newest version, 20.4.2, for shits and giggles and the issue still persists.

Another thing I've noticed is that this problem happens the most when I'm playing 4K videos. Normally 1080p/720p videos play fine, but they will cause this issue from time to time as well.

I never had an issue with playback on either video player until I installed my 5700XT a while back. I previously was using an Nvidia GTX 970, and a GTX 670 before that and never once had this issue.

If anyone has any ideas what might be causing this or knows something I can try to see if it fixes the problem I'm all ears (or eyes).

Thanks!