omxplayer freezes after running videos repeatedly on Pi3

[foleyj2]

I was using a Raspberry Pi 3 with the latest Raspberry Pi 32bit desktop OS.
On my older Pi 1, I could run omxplayer in a loop with mp4 files (h.264) and it would keep going on forever.
On my current Pi, it is able to run a video for about 4 times then it suddenly freezes.
Sometimes the screen is corrupted or just has a green bar on top.
There aren't any obvious errors in the logs, but it gives a kernel panic on shutdown.
The "ps" output indicates a "omxplayer [defunct]"