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User profile for user: Nico1666
Nico1666 Author
User level: Level 1
9 points

All h264 video playbacks, decodings and encodings with hardware acceleration getting artifacts, washed out images, pixelation.

All h264 video playbacks, decodings and encodings with hardware acceleration getting artifacts, washed out images, pixelation.


Issues appear in macos:

vlc player with hardware decoder activated (deactivated hardware decoder has no issue)

chrome video playback eg. youtube or video coded test sites, only h264 videos has issues.

Quicktime player same issues.

finalcut pro preview window is washed out, pixelated, artifacts. Even the exported project is garbage.


also tested in windows 10 bootcamp, same if not even worser issues.

Tested on windows 10 with vlc player and hardware decoder enabled.


Any ideas? Is this a graphicscard issue? A driver issue? Hardware issue? Its the only issue I get. Gaming works fine.


Test for screenshots made from: http://demo.nimius.net/video_test/



iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Aug 15, 2019 2:27 PM

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User profile for user: Nico1666
Nico1666 Author
User level: Level 1
9 points

Aug 18, 2019 1:50 PM in response to Nico1666

Made some more tests, windows 10 (bootcamp) does not has this issue.

All other codecs working fine on macos. Vlc uses videotoolbox for decoding.

Quicktime player, vlc, final cut pro, basically all decoder and encoder running with hardware acceleration run into this issue.


Is this a hardware damage or a faulty driver? Running latest macos.

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User profile for user: Nico1666
Nico1666 Author
User level: Level 1
9 points

Aug 18, 2019 4:32 PM in response to dialabrain

This issue only appears inside hardware encoded or decoded videos with h264 codec.


h265 has no issues for example.

vp8 and vp9 also no issue. The only codec which has those green/purple artifacts is h264 with hardware acceleration.


I have no other issues on the system, only inside videos.


In the meantime, I formatted the whole macos partition and installed a fresh macos Mojave.

The issue still exists.


what hardware does the h264 videotoolbox hardware decode use? Is it the cpu? Is it the gpu? How can I test if this is a driver or hardware issue?


I also tried to set the cooling fan to maximum. To see if this is a cooling issue, but the issue appears from the very first to last second.


It is not a persistent grid, the image gets worse, reset to „better“, gets worse again, resets to „better“, gets worse again. And so on.


A hardware issue would be persistent?

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All h264 video playbacks, decodings and encodings with hardware acceleration getting artifacts, washed out images, pixelation.

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