Comment by jerf

Dying on the exact same frame, or just generally in the same spot?

In the case of the latter my first thought would be thermals. Different video codecs have significantly different decoding costs, and may also stress different parts of your system. You could check for that by playing that same video but not starting at the beginning and see if it's the same duration. Or jump to just before it dies and see if it plays through.

If by "downloaded" you mean The High Seas, those who provision the high seas are often on the cutting edge of using codecs with every last feature turned on to make the videos smaller to squeeze every last bit out of the encodings that they can, which can make them unusually expensive to decode. Or so I've heard.