Brave window will flicker on video sites when scrolling and switching tabs

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On Youtube, the browser window will always flicker (turn black for about 0.1 sec) when scrolling past the size of one page, but only if the video is loaded (so not when finished or if not started). It will also flicker when switching tabs, or switching and then scrolling, which also happens on other video sites, or just sites with embedded videos. But not if the video isn’t loaded of course. It’s not horrible, but it is annoying.

I confirmed that only the Brave window flickers (not other programs or desktop) and the behavior is not seen on other browsers. Extensions and second profile do not change anything. I’m on a Legion 5 laptop with a Ryzen 7 5800h and RTX 3060. Brave is:
Version 1.30.87 Chromium: 94.0.4606.71 (Official Build) (64-bit)

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@nito,

Can you try disabling Hardware Acceleration in settings to see if this resolves the issue?

You’ll find this in Settings --> Additional Settings --> System --> Hardware Acceleration

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Ohh yes, I turned it off and it fixed the issue, thanks. I should’ve thought of that, my laptop is on dynamic graphics meaning it switches from integrated to discrete when necessary, which might be causing the flickers. Though discrete GPU was usually at 0% use and the flicker happened always, hm. Well, thank you once again.
PS: Is my browser going to be slower now that hw acceleration is off?

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@nito,

Nope! You shouldn’t notice any difference in browser performance with HWA disabled.

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Hi there,

I have to chime in here to set some misleading comments here straight.

  1. disabling an important feature like Hardware Acceleration isn’t “resolving” the problem. The problem is a bug in braves code and disabling a core functionality is a stopgap solution at best, a temporary bandaid at worst. It’s like a customer coming into the repair shop saying the engine rattles loudly in gear 5 and you tell em “just use the first 2 gears then, resolved!”

  2. Disabling Hardware Acceleration DOES have a negative effect on the performance of your browser. Heck, it’s in the name of the feature: “Acceleration”.

In conclusing: there is a bug in Brave that darkens videos during playback/reduces the dynamic range of a video and when you scroll it temporarly shows what the video actually should look like.

Deactivating Hardware Acceleration bypasses the problem temporarily but at the expense of performance.