Flashing

seajay

@lorna Yeah, absolutely. It's new with El Cap - been using flux for years on osx without issue before. The symptom presents itself when manually adjusting brightness using either the keyboard (f1/f2) controls or dragging the slider in System Preferences>Displays. Any manual change to brightness results in flux flashing off until the new brightness locks in, which is pretty jarring at night.

lorna

This is super helpful, thanks. Hope we have a good answer for you soon. Meanwhile if you want, you could try gfx.io to lock one or the other card (I'm maybe making a big assumption that it's dual GPU here) and see if you can track down which one is causing the problem.

@seajay said:

@lorna Yeah, absolutely. It's new with El Cap - been using flux for years on osx without issue before. The symptom presents itself when manually adjusting brightness using either the keyboard (f1/f2) controls or dragging the slider in System Preferences>Displays. Any manual change to brightness results in flux flashing off until the new brightness locks in, which is pretty jarring at night.

seajay

@lorna Tried gfx.io and received the following error:

You are using a system that gfxCardStatus does not support. Please ensure that you are using a MacBook Pro with dual GPUs.

That jives, since I'm fairly certain all 13" Macbooks use integrated graphics cards. The 2013 retina mpbs use Intel HD Graphics 4000.

Of note, I tried disabling rootless and that fixed the problem.

lorna

Oh boy, that is very interesting, thank you for the update. Wow.

seajay

@seajay Yeah, I know that's probably not the answer you were hoping for. I disabled rootless to see if it would help me get more functionality out of iStat Menus, which did work. It also fixed f.lux, which was an unexpected but much appreciated side effect.

I know most users should definitely NOT be disabling rootless, since it's an important security measure. Still though, it's nice to have my old apps working properly again.

lorna

Thanks for letting us know anyway, it's useful to know. I'm glad you got it fixed for now.

masonjames

As of the latest El Capitan (beta 4) I can confirm that on a 2015 13" macbook pro the "Ambient light compensation" option appears and, when disabled, fixes the flashing issue.

nchan2177

I am on a 2013 13" RMBP on PB2 (aka Developer Beta 4) - there is no option to disable ambient light compensation

Also yes, all 13" RMBPs do not have dual graphics cards - there is only Intel Integrated Graphics

seajay

@nchan2177 said:

I am on a 2013 13" RMBP on PB2 (aka Developer Beta 4) - there is no option to disable ambient light compensation

Also yes, all 13" RMBPs do not have dual graphics cards - there is only Intel Integrated Graphics

Yeah, still same deal on beta 4 with my 2013 13" rMBP. No ambient light option. Still have to disable rootless to get flux to work.

polocanada

I am getting similar problem on Mac Mini 2010 with 2 identical Dell monitors attached through the HDMI and MiniDisplay Ports. Both monitors use identical profile setting ( each of the monitors has its own ICC profile).

The issue with flickering is when I wake up the machine from Stand-by. When the monitors turn on, they start flashing quickly about 3 times between the optimized (flux night mode) colour and totally white (I guess 5000) . When Flux profile is not active during daytime, there is no flashing or maybe it's very negligible.

I checked the event log and there is an entry that seems it's when the flashing happens...

2015-08-14 1:42:47.991 AM Flux[589]: Display list confused, doing full reset.

HG

I just upgraded to el capitan and I am facing the same issue. I am on a RMBP early 2013. When I choose the color effects -> Movie Mode i f.lux I am getting the flashing behaviour. It renders f.lux impossible to use .

HG

the flashing stops temporarily if the f.lux menu has been opened via the menu bar and stays that way as long as the menu is open even with movie mode enabled.

mikeatlas

@HG I have the same problem here. Old 2008 MBP actually, but still a workhorse minus battery life.

Here's an WEBM and GIF link I recorded crudely with my phone:

http://gfycat.com/HatefulAdvancedHypsilophodon
http://giant.gfycat.com/HatefulAdvancedHypsilophodon.gif (note: 11mb GIF, 28x smaller is link above)

Specs: 15.4" 1400x900 Built-in Display (no Retina), dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256mb graphics card
2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8G GB 1067 MHz DDR3 memory (back when you could swap out the RAM, ha! upgrades!)

One built in display, one 24" Asus external monitor.

Screenshot galleries of my Laptop "About this Mac" and displays versions link below. There are no "Ambient" light settings available in my Display preferences menu options as far I can tell; either my laptop is too old to support that bit of hardware or something but I get the same flickering problem described in "Movie Mode" on El Capitan 10.11.0. F.lux version 36.3.

http://imgur.com/a/cG8bc

HG

@lorna @herf is there a possible workaround or fix on the way for this flashing issue ?

herf

This looks like the Ambient Light Compensation issue, but we thought Apple had pulled it from El Capitan, so we took out our workaround.

The last build with this fix was 36.0 - so try this one and see if it helps? It has a lot of bugs we fixed (but they are reasonably minor).

https://justgetflux.com/mac/Flux36.0.zip

@herf, I confirm that in my case, Flux36.0.zip does not have the flashing problem

HG

@herf I am on version 36.3. The Ambient Light Compensation option does not show up in display prefrences. I am guessing that it did not make the final cut for el capitan and Apple yanked it .

HG

@herf I just installed v36 from your link and it seems to fix the issue with flashing. Thanks.

herf

Can either of you post the Apple Menu->About This Mac "version" number?

So if you are on the GM there must be some cases where the behavior is there but not something you can turn off.

HG

Here are my specs
RMBP - early 2013
OS X El Capitan
V10.11