Can't preview any video; program freezes upon attempt to Play

[Mwarren]

For reasons that are completely unknown to me, Premiere has stopped behaving reliably on my work laptop. When I scrub through any video/timeline/preview, the only thing I ever see is Media Pending (and there's no sound). If I attempt to hit Play, the program will hang and I have to force quit. This problem has persisted for more than a month.

But what's killing me about this is that, much earlier today, after not having turned my attention to this in weeks, I was able to edit a video project with no difficulty. So I assumed my previous problems were a fluke and thought the problem solved. But when I returned to Premiere this afternoon, the problem resurfaced. And now, of course, time is an issue and I need to get this project done.

I assumed that, perhaps there's some other program that now interacts adversely with Premiere, so I closed everything down and tried again. No luck. So, I rebooted, pointedly didn't start any other programs, and tried again. Same. I ran a Windows update, sat through that. Rebooted multiple times. No luck.

So I'm here now. If any of you have any idea what's going on, I'd love to know. My laptop is a Dell Precision 5520 | Core i5 @ 2.8 Ghz. Here's my MSINFO​. I'm happy to provide whatever additional data anyone thinks is important.

Thanks for your attention.

[Mwarren]

Follow-up: I got in this morning and thought I'd revisit Premiere. I opened my project and actually saw my video! in the Main Footage window... but then, as I was clicking through my sequence, eventually the Media Pending thing returned...

[Mwarren · Accepted solution]

Okay, huuuuuge props to Adobe Tech Support for completely fixing my issue. The remote-access person was thorough and identified that I had an outdated video driver. This is quite in spite of the fact that my Dell Command Update program never identified my video driver as needing updating.

But there's more. Back when this first happened at least a month ago, I thought to download the Intel HD 630 Graphics driver from this page, but when I installed it, there was a failure at the very end where I was informed the attempt failed. Well, I should have been more persistent and downloaded the alternative available download (instead of just assuming an incompatibility, as I did).

Basically, on that page above, you'll see two options under "Available Downloads". The first is an executable. The second is a zip. We found that the second link worked when the tech-rep installed using that one.

Once that was done, and after a reboot, I confirmed that Premiere Pro works just fine.

Thanks again for solving this oh mystery person in a call center in a far off place.