WidevineCDM issue with Chrome browser and Spotify

[Rob1991]

Plan

Free

This has been an ongoing issue that I have never bothered to try get resolved for almost a year now. After hours of searching up the issue, any suggestions to fix it have not worked. It seems to be very random as to who gets the issue too. Some have had luck temporarily fixing the issue using a months old nvidia driver, not really ideal..

When I open Spotify in a chrome browser tab my whole PC will start to stutter and my mouse will lag (Audio will play fine). Youtube/Twitch is perfectly fine. When I close the spotify tab all 3 of my monitors will briefly go black and turn on again, then the stutter goes away, aswell as the WidevineCDM process in chrome task manager.

I believe I found the cause by opening chrome task manager and seeing WidevineCDM running with high CPU usage when on the spotify tab. I cant tell if its a nvidia driver issue, chrome, windows, but something is conflicting with the Widevine DRM.

Things tried from other search suggestions

- Deleting of widevinecdm folder in AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data, starting chrome as administrator, and updating from chrome://components

- Trying everything without any extensions/plugins

- Trying everything without antivirus/firewall when updating widevinecdm

- Making sure widevine Prooperties>Security> my name has all permissions granted

- Finally last night.. I reluctantly re installed chrome, still get same issues on fresh install with no additional plugins.

After all this I installed firefox and things worked fine, Edge browser has the same issues. The only suggestion I refuse to do is a full PC reformat. I have seen people say they tried this and it was still causing problems.

Out of ideas now, and I seem to be the only person who has monitors go black when closing the tab with spotify running, and only a few have the stuttering.

4770k - GTX 980ti - x3 monitors 60hz