Fullscreen youtube colour artefacting.

David Schlachter

I experience this issue on my 2013 MacBook Air, but not on my 2010 MacBook. Both have the same configuration (the 2010 MacBook runs off a clone of the Air's SSD).

Nitesh Singh

I see this is a very old issue and I'm still seeing it, El Capitan 10.11.4, Iris Pro 5200. 7 months out, any word on a resolution?

benfowler

There is 1 easy hack to avoid this issue.

Put the mouse curser onto the youtube / netflix video scroll bar at the bottom of the screen.
The issue seems to arise due to refresh rate at full screen video in safari.
Possibly to save battery, safari technology doesnt refresh areas of the screen that have pixels the dont change or similar.
But when you put the curser over this area, , it does seem to solve the issue .

Poaji

I'm still having the same issue in OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.3

Nitesh Singh

@David-Schlachter It seems related to Intel integrated GPUs. Intel/Apple never got around to fixing it on the Intel Mac driver.

shariffy

What @benfowler said works. Which is mystifying... Anyone has any idea why showing the controls would affect the refresh rate or any other aspect of rendering?

Also @f-lux-team: have you considered open-sourcing this project? Someone who's affected and with some coding chops might be able to give more debug info and maybe even submit a patch?

Thanks for the great work and for looking into this issue.

innerbat

@shariffy The bug is not in f.lux, it's in the OS video driver. Open-sourcing would do nothing.

lorna

This is correct. Thanks for the offer though.

@innerbat said:

@shariffy The bug is not in f.lux, it's in the OS video driver. Open-sourcing would do nothing.

shariffy

@lorna Fair enough. Just a wild thought as this is both a long-standing issue and affecting quite a few users.

@innerbat I am aware. That said, I doubt Intel and Apple are falling over themselves to fix the issue. My thought was to research how f.lux could detect when the glitch will happen and (offer to) disable itself in those problematic cases. Research which could be easier with access to the code. But thanks for shooting down a benign suggestion within a minute of posting. :) Here's your sticker.

iJudg3u

just to give an update: I still have the same problem with OSX 10.11.4, Safari 9.1 and flux 36.6. Btw moving the mouse does prevent the artefacts from happening, but who wants to do that all the time in fullscreen right? ;)

@lorna any word from the intel guys on this? thanks!

kaicrawf

This post is deleted!

Hello! I'm having the same problem with artefacting, but in quicktime. If a spot in the video is pure white, and the video is playing with the cursor hidden, then white spots are not tinted, rather pure white. You can see when I start playing the video that the colors brighter on the GIF here.

MacBook Pro late 2013

kypreonyc

is anything being done about this or should i just uninstall f.lux?

This used to be a deal breaker for me too but the workaround suggested by @benfowler is perfect and currently the most convenient way to avoid the issue.

There is 1 easy hack to avoid this issue.

Put the mouse curser onto the youtube / netflix video scroll bar at the bottom of the screen.
The issue seems to arise due to refresh rate at full screen video in safari.
Possibly to save battery, safari technology doesnt refresh areas of the screen that have pixels the dont change or similar.
But when you put the curser over this area, , it does seem to solve the issue .

Orico

@jonsnow When you do that, you are not really in full screen any more, because the video title appears so does the video timeline scroll bar, taking up 10% of the top and 10% of the bottom and adding distractions.

I'm experiencing the same issues with fullscreen YouTube videos, I found if you zoom in (cmd, +) it removes/stops the artifacting so you don't need to keep your curser on the timeline blocking some of the video, it doesn't effect the video just makes the playback elements larger. No idea why this works or if it helps with netflix.

wiwi1019

I'm on MacBook Air 2015 and have the exact same issue, and I found a simple solution:

Use Firefox at night.

lbspht

Hi all, it has to be issue in Safari. It appears in videos from various web pages. I can't believe Apple is doing nothing with this....

aimingforangels

Hey all,
Definitely not just a Safari issue. Having the same problem and can replicate the results in both Safari and Chrome. Admittedly, I have not tried Firefox.

Running MBP 13" (Early 2015) with the Intel Iris 6100 chipset.
Chrome ver. 53.0.2785.46 beta (64-bit)
Safari ver. 9.1.2 (11601.7.7)
f.lux ver. 37.3

I've found that, for some reason, this issue doesn't occur when you crank the display scaling in System Preferences to the highest it will go. (1680x1050 on my set up).