Chrome causing Final Cut Pro X to slow down, freeze, and crash

Chrome is causing Final Cut Pro X to become unresponsive and crash for some users by hogging video encoding frameworks, a noted video editor has claimed on Twitter.

Felipe Baez, Creative Director and founder of Cre8ive Beast has pegged Chrome as the reason many users have been experiencing massive slowdowns within Final Cut Pro X.

It appears Chrome is to blame, hogging necessary resources which brings Final Cut Pro X to a halt.

If you use FCPX, don't use Chrome. Well, if you use any editing app, don't use Chrome. Just discovered Chrome locking down the VideoToolBox framework and making FCPX REALLY slow and crashing.
— Felipe Baez (@baezfelipe) June 20, 2019

"Just discovered Chrome locking down the VideoToolBox framework and making FCPX REALLY slow and crashing," Baez shared on Twitter.

Chrome at some point apparently accesses and monopolizes VideoToolBox, which is a low-level framework that gives Final Cut Pro X access to hardware-based encoders and decoders when working with video. When Chrome starts using VideoToolBox, it doesn't stop, which causes a problem for video editors.

Baez says he clocked the CPU usage at 300% and resulted in FCPX locking up and crashing. Once he quit Chrome and VideoToolBox was released, Final Cut Pro X was able to operate as normal.

This issue won't just plague Final Cut Pro X, it will apply to any video editors or transcoders that are relying on VideoToolBox for encoding, decoding, and transcoding. Chrome is a notorious resource hog, frequently occupying large amounts of RAM for Mac users.

Preliminary testing on Handbrake is showing an impact on encode times, with a first run with nothing else running but an idle Chrome and Handbrake using VideoToolKit showing approximately a 30% hit to H.265 encoding speeds versus Handbrake and Safari running. AppleInsider is continuing to look into the situation.

39 Comments

racerhomie3 7 Years · 1264 comments

About 5 years ago

Never trust Google. #switchtoduckduckgo

ericthehalfbee 13 Years · 4489 comments

While I think it's poor coding on the part of Google to monopolize a resource, I also think Apple should make it so that an App can't monopolize any framework.

This reminds me of the early days of Windows and co-operative multitasking where you had to rely on a program to behave and not steal all the processor time sp your other programs could also run.

larryjw 9 Years · 1036 comments

ericthehalfbee said:

While I think it's poor coding on the part of Google to monopolize a resource, I also think Apple should make it so that an App can't monopolize any framework.

This reminds me of the early days of Windows and co-operative multitasking where you had to rely on a program to behave and not steal all the processor time sp your other programs could also run.

Well, the problem is Unix, Linux, MacOS seem to not be preemptive OSes in Kernel Mode, where it seems this Framework is executing.