A redditor has found a pretty strange bug on the Pixel right now. Where some Tensor-powered Pixel devices are crashing and rebooting when playing a specific video on YouTube. That specific clip would be a 4K HDR clip from the movie Aliens.
Basically, when you attempt to open it in the YouTube app, your Pixel might hang, crash and then reboot instantaneously. Here’s the full reddit thread about the issue. For now, it appears to only happen with this specific video.
This does sound pretty similar to the bug Pixels had a few years ago about using one specific wallpaper forcing the phone to crash. It ended up being an issue with color encoding. So that might be the issue here as well. Still an odd behavior for one specific video. At least, one video that we’ve heard about so far.
It’s not limited to just the Pixel 7 series
The reddit thread shows that users with the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6a series are also having the same issue. So it seems to be any Tensor-powered Pixel having this issue right now. But it’s also worth noting that this is not happening to every Pixel 6, 6a and 7 series device out there. I’ve tried it on the Pixel 7, and it crashed and rebooted. But on the Pixel 7 Pro, it doesn’t. It just plays the clip as expected.
Hopefully Google will get this figured out and push out an update pretty soon to fix this issue. The March update is due to hit next week, so hopefully Google can get a fix put into that security update to fix things.
We’ll continue to follow this story and for now, just don’t play that video on your Pixel 6 or 7. If you really want to watch that clip, watch it on another device, so you can actually watch it.
2023-02-27 15:06:20