When it comes to gamers, Discord has established itself as the go-to utility to keep the communication going without any distractions. The app features a simple yet robust UI, offers instant messaging, community posts, voice and video calls, persistent chats, media sharing, and more to keep communities connected in real-time.
Discord, like any other app out there, isn’t short of any bugs and issues. One problem that has recently surfaced on the platform has got to do with a certain video that ends up terminating users’ current sessions and completely closes the Discord app on their devices. If you’ve been wondering what this video is all about and how you can avoid getting affected, keep reading this post.
Video that Crashes Discord
Several Discord users are complaining that one particular video that has been making the rounds on the gamer-focused chat service is crashing the entire app on their computers.
What looks like a scene from an anime, can, in this case, cause your computer to completely shut down the Discord app and leave you to wonder what went wrong. If you’re wondering what’s this video all about, go ahead, take a look at it.
What happens when you play this video on Discord?
While it looks like a harmless video that lasts only a couple of seconds, it might do some short time damage to your ongoing chats. When you play this video on Discord, it will play and soon after the character in the video slaps, Discord will crash automatically and this will keep happening as many times as you play it inside Discord.
Why does Discord crash every time you play that video?
The reason why many Windows systems are crashing after you attempt to play this video is that the file in question is corrupted. This is believed to be done using a hex editor using which the video was modified with confusing data and thus making Discord unable to play it. This video fails to load up on Discord because it is made using the FFmpeg command line and stitching two videos of different resolutions and color spaces together into one file.
When Discord’s native mp4 player tries to read it, it fails to load the video as it has alternating resolutions and color spaces and it has to switch between different values during playback. Because the changes in color and resolution cannot be handled well by Discord’s player after you start playing the video, it dies taking the Discord app with it.
Since Discord’s Windows client is based on Chromium, this is as much Discord’s shortcoming as it is Chromium’s. But the video, however, doesn’t fail to load on Google Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers on Windows. It’s able to switch between different resolutions which Discord fails to do.
Here’s a technical explanation in case you were looking for one.
Is it a virus/malware of some sort?
NO. The “slap” video isn’t any sort of virus or malware but just a corrupted file. In fact, the file is so corrupted, it fails to load up even on the VLC, which is known to support a wide range of file formats, no matter how large.
But you need to make sure you stay clear of this video the next time you bump into it on Discord.
What devices are affected?
The Discord crash video only affects Discord desktop clients running on Windows PCs.
Linux and macOS machines using the Discord app to play this video won’t succumb to any kind of crashes. We even tried testing the Discord app and web client on our MacBook to check if it did anything, but nothing weird happens.
What happens if I play this video on Linux and Mac?
For the sake of testing, we tried sharing and playing the “slap” video on the Discord app on our Mac and its web client. As expected, the crash issue doesn’t appear to affect Mac systems as both the desktop and web apps of Discord are able to play the video like any other video.
Like Macs, Linux computers will also remain unaffected by this video and you won’t end up losing your current Discord session.
Should you worry about it?
Absolutely not, so long that you stay away from this video and any videos that are known to crash Discord. As for those wondering if there might be a fix, there seems to be a test build of the Discord app that’s already immune to the video. Playing the video on Discord’s test build will freeze the video, preventing you from playing, pausing, or seeking it, but it won’t in any way crash the Discord app.
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The question is why does it only affect the Windows client?