15" MacBook lagging during video playback

HWTech is right. You have too much stuff running already to also play a movie.

I dunno what Bearisdriving is.

X11 and quartz on the Mac side is unlikely to be useful when Metal is the fundamental graphics language.

What does Chromium do for you? all I can find says there may be malware with that name.

You need to not be loading so many things automatically, and only when needed.

Are you using VirtualBox all day every day?

secure disk -- the best protection against all data loss is not a Utility like this (that may punish performance) it is having a recent backup, such as the ones created automatically in the background by Time machine.

are you emulating android software all day every day? if not, Bluestacks app player could be removed until you need it.

Your drive is fast, but you are running so much stuff at once that you are showing some swap used under memory.

The choice of Chrome as your browser is very resource intensive. Better new versions of Firefox or Safari that are not so resource-hungry and are faster would likely give better results.

I agree with the recommendation to run Etrecheck. It is a "discovery" utility, not a fix and not really a diagnostic. But armed with the information it provides, problems like slowness are much easier to diagnose.

Using EtreCheck - Apple Community

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Your WiFi signal and noise look good. Are you connecting to your router with 802.11n for better bandwidth?

There are some apps in the EtreCheck report I'm not familiar with so will have to leave it to @Grant and others. However, it seems like you have a lot of stuff launching so you may need to quit them since their respective apps may not be running. You can try booting into Safe Mode to see if this solves your problems. Then you know one or more of those items is affecting video streaming/playback.

Have you tried downloading several HD movie trailers and playing them all at once? This should help to narrow down a system issue versus an internet issue although the encoding methods and apps can also have an effect.

Have you tried to connect the laptop directly to the router using an Ethernet Cable?

Have you rebooted your modem and router? Reboot your laptop as well when you do this.

What is the WiFi signal strength and noise? You can get this information by Option clicking the WiFi icon on the menu bar.

There is also a WiFi diagnostic option there as well.

Maybe you need to run EtreCheck and post the report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

Major Issues:

Anything that appears on this list needs immediate attention.

No Time Machine backup - Time Machine backup not found.

Runaway process - A process is using a large percentage of your CPU.

You may be able to use Activity Monitor CPU pane to discover what is using a lot of CPU.

Your paging is better, no swap used.

It would be nice to see the Diagnostics digest, or you can look in that directory for any .panic reports.

Diagnostics Information (past 7 days):

Directory /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports is not accessible.

Enable Full Drive Access to see more information.

All of that is looking much better, with the exception of the major Road-Hog Chrome.

Maybe now you could play a Video without lagging. If not, I nominate Chrome as the next thing to 'optimize" (Read: discard and use a better, faster browser).

If you are suing Wi-Fi to get access to that content, do you have good speed over Wi-Fi?

Use an Internet speed test to find out. It bypasses most software issues.

Try booting into recovery mode, go in the terminal there and type in

nvram 8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c:epid_provisioned=%01%00%00%00

Rob827--

How about an explanation of just what that does, before you tell somebody to do it.

... and instructions for how to Undo if not satisfactory.