Thanks for your replies Rethanis and Adison.
Even though i still have the same internet provider, i now think it may be a problem there. Something appears to have changed. I’m still not sure, but will investigate further.
I apologise for what may have been false alarm.
Even so, i will keep Honey in mind, although i think i’d been using it for some time before the problem began.
Regarding browsers, as i mentioned earlier, the problem wasn’t the same with other browsers: Safari performed better, but still froze once during the test period, although it was much easier to return to playback, given Chrome and Brave have a number of intermediate steps.
I had no real issues when i used Maxthon browser during my first test, but i decided to use it for video today, and had a freeze and some odd behaviour eg video playback suddenly going into silent fast forward. I also tried Prime Video, and that stalled as well, though i’d never had problems with it before (the last time i watched video on Prime i think was June).
In any case, i will look into this problem further, and report back if i find out what’s going on before this thread gets locked.