Search Unity

Bug OSX - Unity Editor causes freeze on other media playbacks on Mac

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by pertz, Dec 20, 2020.

  1. pertz

    pertz

    Joined:
    Jan 8, 2015
    Posts:
    106
    I'm having this problem for about a year, hoping it will go away on an update but it never does.

    Im not sure on which version it started (Im currently using 2019.4.15, but I probably had this problem on 2018.x). I will try to add some keywords because I have searched this problem several times over the past months and couldnt find anything related. It's a freeze/crash problem related to the Unity Editor and video (or music) playback on other apps on Mac, and also happens with Whatsapp (both standalone app or web).

    The problem: while Unity Editor is open, almost any video playback or music playback on the computer freezes the playback (no sound goes out, or the video frame freezes and wont proceed, or sometimes the playback's app/process will stop responding and I have to kill it).

    Unity Editor is never affected itself, it runs smoothly while the other apps freeze, so it took me months to notice that the problem is caused by Unity, but the problem only reflects on other apps. I thought it was a random freeze of the playback program/site, such as Spotify, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc, or something wrong with my computer. When this freeze happens on a webpage (youtube, whatsapp web, or any other media playback) only the tab freezes, and I have to kill the tab, the other tabs continue working fine (I dont have to kill Chrome as a whole).

    But the thing is, when I dont have Unity Editor running, it NEVER freezes the other playback apps. In the past I spent a couple months doing mostly documentation work, and it never froze, I had even forgotten about the problem, then when I got back to coding on Unity the media playbacks started to freeze again, that's when I saw the correlation between WhatsApp freezing and Unity Editor running.

    Maybe it's something that happens only on some specific MBPs. It happens on both my dev MBP (2018 i9 32gb) and also on my "general-purpose" MBP which I use for other things besides dev (2019 MBP 16gb i7 I think, maybe i5). Maybe it even happened on my previous MBP (~2017), Im not sure. But on my employees' Macs (older/lower end MBPs) this problem never happened, with the same Unity version and OSX version. Both my MBPs have 2 video cards (Intel and a higher end AMD Radeon), maybe their MBPs dont have? I dont know what else is different between our Macs (apart from processor and RAM).

    So, any light? Anyone else have this same problem or similar? I'm desperate, it's very annoying. I'm sure this problem is somewhat rare, since I never found anything about it, and some people who do suffer from this problem have no idea that Unity is causing it.