iPad freezing when playing video.

If your iPad "freezes" when you play video (not "stutters", but "freezes - requiring a hard restart), make an appointment at the Genius Bar. They will require you to demonstrate that the iPad completely locks up when playing video. When it does, they will replace your unit.

I did have a help ticket, but the genius did not even ask for the number until he was finishing up his documentation. If you do call in, all they will do is have you restore your machine to original software and resync. That won't solve the issue.

My new unit works perfectly.

BTW- when I mentioned this Discussion Thread, the genius said that these threads are little more than rumor mills. He completely discounted it. It makes you wonder why Apple has these if they are so useless. It sure helped me.

My 16gb launch unit froze during almost every time during streaming video. Playing videos stored on the device had no problems. Brought it in to the apple store and they swapped it out.

My new unit works flawlessly. Thisis definitely a hardware problem IMO.

Well...at least Apple gives users a place to connect with other users and we can help each other out. I'm glad these posts are here...if it wasn't for this I probably would not have known what to do. The people at the store may not care about these forums, but I'm sure there is someone at apple who monitors these things and will at least tell someone about it...even if nothing gets done. The more their techs engineers hear about the problem, the better chance they have at fixing it and keeping their users happy 🙂

I am still dealing with phone support, I made a video of it freezing for them and sent in the crash logs. I hope I can get this resolved...It is looking more and more like a HW issue though because I've already done a restore and didn't even install any apps and can usually reproduce the issue within 30 mins of video playing \ browsing.

That's the thing though..sometimes it will be fine but it will always crash on me at least once daily when watching a vid...and then I will reset it and go to that same exact video and it will play 100% all the way through with no issue, and then I'll go to another video and that will cause it to crash.

I hope I can get a new iPad soon..Just got a Griffin skin \ case and it's really nice...was hoping to pick up the dock tomorrow as well...maybe the tech will hook me up with an appt. at the genius bar and get me a new ipad as well and I can only hope and pray that the new one will not be affected!

Message was edited by: NiqueXyZ

Based on this thread, I brought my iPad into my local Apple store tonight and got it replaced at the Genius Bar. On the original one, I could get the video playback to lock up the iPad in a few minutes pretty reliably -- sometimes much less than a minute. With the new one, I've been playing something for a half hour now without a problem... Thanks so much for posting this info!

Thought I would post back my resolution. You can read my previous posts on this thread to see a detailed description of my problem...

After doing a full restore to default settings and being able to reproduce the frozen iPad state when playing any video, I called in to Apple Care. They sent me a box, which I used to send the iPad back in to them with. They then shipped me a new iPad.

After about a week with it, it has not locked up even once. It is completely stable. With the old one, I could get it to lock up every single time I played a video (if the video was long enough). My test case was the most recent Apple Keynote at around 59 minutes.

Apple was also very interested in getting my iPad to their engineering team for further investigation.

This was definitely a hardware problem and swapping the hardware has completely resolved the issue. Obviously this is only affecting a smaller portion of the iPads and I'm not sure we could say how rare this condition is.

So the main lesson here is that if you are having this problem, just go ahead and have them swap out your defective iPad for a new one.

To Shkevin:

I don't think it would hurt to bring it to Apple in it's frozen state.

I also have to say 'thank you' for BigZials for starting this thread. Pointing out to Apple the existence of this thread really helped with the 'exchange process' at the Apple Genius Bar. So far it's been a few days since I got my iPad replaced and the video 'freeze-ups' no longer happen.

I have expirienced video freezes twice today.

Apple support on the phone tells me to check my wifi (aaaah!) and to do a restore.

When you guys do an exchange, do you require to take a box into the store, the original box?

Thanks

I too had this same issue.

After explaining all my troubleshooting and full restore effort, the Apple Genius Bar agreed to replace my iPad even though the tablet refused to umm, crash, while doing all kinds of video tests. I was afraid that if he didn't see it, he may not replace it.

Anyhow, I'm sure glad he swapped it last week. I've strained this iPad with video with no issue whatsoever. This hardware issue seems to have hit only a small amount of folks, but it's an easy fix. Just have Apple swap it!

Gotta say, Apple's customer service has always been fantastic.

Jacques

iPad 16gb.

My wife's has been freezing multiple times with video sites, along with the blue dots across the screen.

This has happened about 7 times during 2 movies, hard reset is the only fix. I will be returning it tomorrow, as it is only 4 days new.

Hopefully the next one will work better

After days of having videos crash, I received a replacement ipad from my local Apple Store.

They keep them in brown boxes, they take your old one, and give you new one.

Very simple process, once you explain to the Genius whats going on...

ere's what happened to me: before arriving at my genius bar appointment I let my ipad play a video from the abc app and actually brough the ipad in its frozen state. I thought the genius would take one look at it and replace it like others have been saying. However he goes on to say he can't replace it without doing a restore first.and claims everything is fine after playing a bit of sample video and it didn't freeze. I was certainly not going to go back with a faulty hardware so I waited 15 minutes with the ipad playing the latest episode of lost until it froze yet again. I really thought that would do it but now this frat boy genius wanted to do a side by side comparison with the apple store ipad. I really wanted to punch this guy right in the nose but I complied. So we sat there playing lost for nearly 20 minutes until it finally froze with these convincing gnarly green artifacts all over the screen. that is when this genius finally agreed to give me a service unit as a replacement. Now a day later I turn on the new ipad for the first time and see 2 dead pixels on the left corner of the screen. FML

I am having the same issue as everyone else is reporting.

The unit locks up while using the video player and netflix. The only resolve is to do a full reset. I have restored twice.

Is there any ack from Apple about this? It seems to be widely reported.

I'm having the same problem with my iPad 64GB.

It froze 6 times last night while trying to watch an episode of Lost from Air Video.

This must be a hardware problem since everyone on this discussion thread that got replacement units are now free from this problem. I highly doubt a firmware/software update will fix this at all.

I'm sending mine to Apple...

I will let you know when I get my replacement unit.

The original iPad I received from the first Saturday shipments had some dead pixels so I had it swapped at my local Apple Store for one of the 'service' units in the brown boxes. They assured me it was new and not a refurb or other returned unit. The Geniuses were not real familiar with that whole process (yet) but swapped it nonetheless. The first unit never froze at all doing anything, including video playback of all kinds, including those listed below.
The replacement unit constantly freezes when playing back video from many sources. ABC player is the worst. It will freeze, or cause the iPad to spontaneously restart. I record OTA HD TV shows with Elgato EyeTV on my iMac and encode for iPhone and sync these to the iPad via iTunes. These H.264 videos freeze. I share AppleTV resolution H.264 EyeTV shows via web sharing on my Mac Pro and access these through the iPad's Safari browser. These H.264 videos freeze. All of the same files that freeze the iPad never freeze my iPhone, Macs or AppleTV.
So, content resident on the iPad freezes, along with web content streamed via wifi from my TimeCapsule on a very fast cable internet connection (20gb+ downstream.) I monitor the Time Capsule's wifi logs and see no issues except that the iPad reconnects after each crash and hard reset. The only way to recover from this issue is to hard reset holding the home and standby buttons.
So, my not-so-scientific testing and monitoring shows that the second service unit I received is probably no good, but the first one with the dead pixels was fine.
I decided to call Apple Support (I have AppleCare on this iPad and all of my equipment) and open a case. I got a call back as promised at exactly the time scheduled and a very competent rep had me reset my settings after spending a good 30 minutes on the phone trying to get it to freeze again, but it did not. I didn't try ABC TV but should have while on the phone with him. We agreed to monitor the situation and we'd check in with each other in a couple of days and I would call back if the problem persisted. It still persists. I left him a message and he'll get back to me.
My problem is that if I return it again for a new unit, what are the chances that the new one will also be bad?? Until Apple identifies the issue and can stock known, good units, I don't want to keep swapping iPads. Though having the bad units to test will help Apple find a resolution for the problem.

Dude! That really ***** you are having so much problems.
Just to update -- after the really helpful phone support, I took my iPad into the store and they replaced it immediately.

The reason why I think it's better to call in to phone support (or email) and _specifically mention this thread_ than just to go to the store is that the people at the Genius bar won't believe you, and if you had the same issue my ipad had, you would know that it doesn't always freeze when playing video...it's very sporadic, and it could take 20-40 minutes to reproduce the problem...who has that much time to sit there at the genius bar hoping that it will freeze up in front of them? If you call or email support first they will log everything to your account and if they say "go to the genius bar and get a new ipad" the guy\girl in the store can look at that and give you a new one right away without wasting any of your time.

BTW, as everyone else has said, my new iPad has not freezed up once since I got it yesterday. This is 100% without a doubt a hardware issue -- doing a restore will not help...it's very important that you mention that to support because that's going to be the first thing they suggest.

Also -- about the dead pixels...seriously man, I feel for you...what is their policy on dead pixels? Do you think you can get another iPad? I would look into it if I were you, or if you're tired of dealing with this just make a huge stink and get a refund.

What I really don't understand about all this is why there are only a few iPads being affected by the video freezing issue.

Maybe this will affect enough people that engadget \ gizmo \ whoever will do an outside investigation and out the problem to the public, because you know Apple will never do that even if they do find out the reasoning behind it.

The tech I was dealing with showed me how to get the panic\crash logs (it's actually very similar to the way OS X logs kernel panics \ application crashes) -- you will have to plug your ipad into your computer running itunes and do a "sync" -- they will be in C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\YourIpadsName (on Windows XP -- location will prob be different on Vista \ 7 -- I think C:\Users but I'm not certain, and on Mac I have no clue).

I had a bunch of these files:

mediaserverd 2010-04-16-202924Nicks-iPad.crash

MediaServerD being the application that all video playback on the ipad is done through (I am guessing?) and the cause being:

Exception Type: EXC BADACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN INVALIDADDRESS at 0x01310000
Crashed Thread: 13

Something along those lines...oh I just thought of something, OS X users check
\Library\Logs\DiagnosticReports or PanicReporter and see if there is a "Mobile Device" folder in there...I could be wrong though.

Message was edited by: NiqueXyZ