This YouTube Video May Crash Your Pixel
Modern smartphones are powerful. Some can shoot 8K video , while others rival the speed and performance of desktops. However, all this advanced processing power ca n’t match the sheer power of… a single YouTube video – at least not on the Google Pixel.
The video in question is a 4K HDR clip from Ridley Scott’s Alien . (I didn’t know smartphones could get scared, but hey, this is a stressful scene.) Simply turning on video can crash your Pixel, causing it to reboot and go back to the home screen. Redditor OGPixel5 seems to have been the first to notice the issue , reaching out to r/GooglePixel on Saturday to ask if anyone else had the same issue. As it turns out, many of them did, while others understandably avoided testing the clip on their own pixels.
9to5Google tested the video on their Pixel 7 Pro and got similar results. At best, they could download the video if it didn’t play, but as soon as they hit the play button, the phone would freeze. In practice, this means that clicking on a video file, which would normally start the video right away, instantly crashes the device.
Based on the original Reddit thread, it appears that a number of Pixel devices are affected by the issue. While the original poster’s device was a Pixel 7 Pro, commenters said the video caused the Pixel 7s, Pixel 6s, and Pixel 6as to crash. In addition, some have complained about losing cell service within minutes of the accident.
One user on the original Reddit thread suggested that the problem could be related to wallpapers that were killing Android phones a couple of years ago. As Mrwhosetheboss points out in his video on the subject , the wallpapers used a different, wider color profile than Android uses (ProPhoto RGB vs SRGB). This in itself is not a problem since Android simply converts one profile to another. However, there was one pixel in the wallpaper whose color values were too high for Android, causing the entire system to crash.
Perhaps something similar is happening in this Alien clip. Maybe one frame (or even one pixel) of that particular HDR video short-circuits Android’s color processing. If so, I believe Google will release a software update to fix this issue.
Until then, stay away from clips from Alien on your Pixel and possibly the horror genre in general.