night-video-tuner
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PyvesB
Extension freezes the system when entering GPU sleep mode
9 months ago, someone left this review on the Firefox Add-on store (highlighting done by me):
Works great when it's working, and I was hoping to roll this into my workstation toolkit - BUT it has a MAJOR bug that makes it completely unusable in practice: when using in conjunction with any fullscreen HTML5 player, this extension will prevent the GPU from correctly leaving (but not from entering) any of its sleep states - effectively crashing the entire system the second it goes to sleep, with the potential to brick the GPU and/or mobo bios any time it happens. Tested in clean installs of Firefox Quantum, Firefox ESR, Waterfox Classic, Waterfox G3 and Waterfox G4, on multiple fresh workstation images (1x W7 + 2xW10) each with different GPUs (GTX 970, RTX 2060, GTX 1080) and substantially different baseline configurations including drivers; 100% reproducibility on every one of them: everything system-wide is ship-shape and working 100%, but add this extension and let the browser idle until it goes to sleep = unresponsive system until hard reset.
Not usable in its current state for this reason.
I want you to take a look at this because it is a serious issue and I don’t want to damage my computer (macOS) with this extension. It might be a Windows-only problem though.
Hello @Openstreetmapler 👋🏻
I want you to
This is a free and open source project, contributing a fix via a pull request will in general be better received than attempting to boss an author around on what you want. 😉
Do you have any ideas? Should I test the extension in a Virtual Machine?
The extension really doesn't do much underneath the hood, it basically adds standard CSS filters (https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_filter.php) to the video element in the HTML page. It would be useful to check whether the same freeze behaviour happens when you manually edit the page HTML and add a filter yourself. If the freeze occurs as well, then I'd recommend reporting the bug to Firefox.
Maybe the extension causes a GPU overload/malfunction because the CSS filter has to update 60 times per second (for 1080p60 gaming videos). I tried a similar feature in Enhancer for YouTube™ and it really causes a lot of CPU/GPU load which also causes the fans of my M1 iMac to spin louder.