My iMac will not play any form of media other than podcasts (read details below—it’s complicated.)
Hi, I have a late 2012 iMac running Catalina 10.5.7 (up to date). Yesterday I was listening to some music via YouTube when all of a sudden the music stopped. After a while I pulled up the browser to see why and the video was just buffering so I reloaded the page and got the same result. I restarted my Wi-Fi and still the video wouldn’t load. I then quit chrome and when to Apple Music instead, but nothing would play in Apple Music either! I tried streaming AND playing music that I have uploaded and stored locally and nothing would play, it just sits at 0:00. Then all of a sudden my computer just shuts off and restarts. When it loads I get a message saying my computer restarted bc of a problem (didn’t give me an error code or anything) and I, again, tried to play media via Apple Music and YouTube and it still wouldn’t play. I then tried to play a video I had edited and exported that was stored on my computer and it wouldn’t play either (not in the finder preview, and not by double clicking and opening QuickTime.) What is weird is that the video pulls up, and I can even scrub through it and see the frames go by so it’s not like it isn’t loading—it just won’t play! I opened Final Cut and go the same result. I can scrub through my entire timeline just fine but it will not play anything back. But you know what is really weird? Even though media will not play anywhere else, the Apple Podcasts app plays podcasts totally fine. That’s the only thing I’ve found that plays. At this point I did a computer update to see if it would help and it didn’t, so I contacted Apple support via message. They had me boot up my iMac in safe mode and try. In safe mode, although it was jittery, it did play media! Once exiting safe mode it wouldn’t play again. They then had me reinstall the macOS but that gave no results. After all that they said they don’t know and recommended I send my computer in. I am an audio engineer & content creator; having a working machine that can play media is absolutely crucial to what I do. This computer is getting older now so I planned on getting a new one in the next 6 months anyway so it’s hardly worth spending the money on repairing it, but bc of supply chain problems I can’t get my hands in a Mac studio or new MacBook for 2 months! Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be wrong? I just need this thing to last me until July lol! It works totally fine in every regard! It for some reason will just not play media all of a sudden. Why would podcasts play perfectly fine, and why would I be able to scrub videos in 4k frame by frame, and yet when you hit play nothing happens? It doesn’t make sense to me. Thank you!
iMac Line (2012 and Later)