About once a week, macOS 10.15.7 loses the ability to play video. Press play and it goes super-fast-forward all the way to the end. Scrubbing while paused works, but any attempt to play fails in any app using AVPlayer -- not just QuickTime Player, but also jwztv and even "Notes". VLC works, but obviously that doesn't help me.
Sound familiar? Any idea how to un-fuck it without rebooting?
I don't see anything obvious in the system logs, but they are so comically verbose that it's impossible for me to tell.
I had that when using eqMac, a system-wide equalizer app. I could see a couple of first seconds of a video, then it stopped, or played super-fast, as you describe. Do you use it, or similar software?
Never heard of that, but my house of cards requires a wobbly base of Audio Hijack, Loopback and OBS in order to accomplish anything at all.
I've seen it but just dismissed it.... However, Google say "coreaudiod". https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/29/macos-fast-video-playback-bug-fix-coreaudiod-video/
So 'pkill -x coreaudiod' ?
Yep. I used to get the exact same "video fast forwards to the end immediately" bug, and killing coreaudiod (it restarts itself) has fixed it without a reboot every time. Hasn't happened to me in a while though so I'm not sure if some update made it better.
Spam this about 20 times until it says no matching process found and wait a few more seconds, then it will be fixed. It is a known bug in Catalina. sudo killall coreaudiod
Usually switching to a different audio output device, then back to the original will fix this for me.