Update: It appears to not be an issue with SMPlayer! It just coincidentally started to happen when switching SMPlayer over to using yt-dlp. Never happened when running youtube-dl and that's why at first I thought it was yt-dlp causing the issue. I now suspect the crashing was due to Chrome running in the background and it launching the included SWReporter service. I have since disabled that and no more crashes since then!
SMPlayer 21.8.0.9999 + yt-dlp crashes on Win32
That did the trick! Version 21.8.0.9999 + yt-dlp. Works perfectly now in the Win32 version. Thanks once again, Ricardo, for your prompt response and always solid solutions! A++ :)
SMPlayer Win32 loads videos slow and keeps stopping
Apparently, YouTube just crashed! Nothing is loading at all. Wow! :O
SMPlayer-Win32 : finished unexpectedly error
YouTube.dl error on SMPlayer Win32
I just fixed it myself by downloading the new youtube.dl from the youtube-dl.org website and placing the exe file in the MPV subfolder. It's working again. But, please note your installer is not downloading that file as part of the install.