this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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No Stupid Questions

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Could be something peculiar to Nvidia GPUs, or maybe it's just Firefox, but I never see this colour anywhere else, only when something causes a glitch in the rendering of video content. Sometimes it's not just the video player that goes green, but the entire viewport of the browser window. I'm mainly curious why it's that colour, rather than just black or white or something like that.

  • HEX: 004d00
  • RGB: rgb(0, 77, 0)

Cheers!

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[–] tenchiken@anarchist.nexus 72 points 6 days ago (4 children)

The Video itself is rendered off screen in a special area of memory, then the browser simply uses a predefined color to tell the driver where to display the video. The driver then takes care of things like stretching to fit etc.

It's not actually that shade typically, and you are just seeing a side effect of the glitch.

[–] Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 5 days ago (2 children)

That doesn't really answer the question though. Obviously it's the side effect of some kind of glitch, but why is it always this green, why not orange or blue

[–] lath@lemmy.world 22 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's the green screen which allows blending, melding, switching and superimposing layers. You see, the way it works is that I don't know, but it got you reading this far and wasted a few moments of your time which could have been spent doing something else, like gardening.

But really the answer is probably because it's very nearly in the middle of the VGA color palette.

[–] Orygin@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Joke's on you, I read that while taking a shit at work :)

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 9 points 5 days ago

Jokes on you, I'm a toilet tester; taking a shit and work is all I do.

[–] dumbass@piefed.social 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Probably causes less eye strain, while being noticeable.

[–] turboSnail@piefed.europe.pub 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Yes, but did some programmer just decide it’s maxed out green, and then somebody else toned it down to a more reasonable green? How did we end up with this specific shade?

Sometimes when part of a keyframe is missing it's filled with gray instead of repeating the previous image. That makes sense since it can get lighter or darker with delta, but IDK why out of bounds is green (and yes, the video decoding can overwrite some of the green if an object travels out of frame, for example).

[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is probably just someone's effort to pick a color similar looking to a green-screen in film, since it is serving the same technical effect.

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I know a video capture program that used a very dark purple for the card to fill in with HW-accelerated video. In Microsoft Office 2003, Clippy uses a pure magenta and other assistants pure cyan. This fails to turn transparent because of desktop compositing in the Aero theme of Windows Vista and 7. So I think it can be any color but software I know uses those unlikely to appear in real video, but in hardware decoders the background of the video decoding buffer is green.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 18 points 5 days ago

That's old school hardware overlays, haven't really been a thing since XP era Windows.

These days everything is a scene graph with normal texture buffers, and the compositor is responsible for either layering stuff over it or doing direct scanout of that surface.

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I've never really thought about what happens to data that the system fetches over the internet. So, just as if it would've been stored in permanent storage locally, it's loaded into system memory, which then "serves" it back to the browser? In my beginner head, it then looks like this: YouTube -> system memory -> browser/media player

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Correct. Eventually millions of very very tiny squirrels then eat the data once it is discarded.

I'm simplifying a bit, but that is generally how it works.

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Okay, but no I'm concerned. Is there squirrel poop in my computer that I need to clean? :(

[–] 42firehawk@fedinsfw.app 2 points 5 days ago

I mean, kind of? There are system traces of what the squirrels ate that build up, causing weird issues with other software over time. It's why restarting your computer fixes so many software errors. Part of the close process of the computer is cleaning up most of the squirrel poops.

[–] flandish@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

it doesn’t just update the dom via x/y? currently making an 8080 emu and am not using browser yet but may. also tell me more about your instance? (am an anarchist myself..)

[–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

anarchist.nexus is a piefed-instance in the anarchist flotilla.

You can read up on it here in the announcement post: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/52641276

[–] flandish@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

nice. will look into it. thx!

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 25 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Not an answer to your question, merely an amusing anecdote, but Windows used to use a green screen (different shade though) to render videos.

"The media player program didn't render the video pixels to the screen," ... Instead, Windows would render a green screen (or a different color, depending on the version), then "render the video pixels to a graphics surface shared with the graphics card." The final step was to "tell the graphics card that whenever it sees a green pixel about to be written to the screen, it should substitute a pixel from that shared graphics surface."

--Windows used to secretly use green screens to render videos, which is how you could trick MS Paint into becoming a video player

Edit: Ninja'd by @x00z@lemmy.world

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago
[–] Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (12 children)

I recall seeing such green on screenshots of DRM protected video on iOS (back when I still had Netflix installed)

I assume that this is DRM protection as well, probably the same, as those streaming apps are mostly just JS these days anyway

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[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 12 points 5 days ago

I haven't seen this exact screen, but since there's very little help in this thread so far, I'll speculate.

I've seen plenty of single solid color screens that turned out to be "fuck you i didn't like something, have a plain color instead of your image" from some piece of Digital Rights Management software.

If it is DRM, the two approaches I'm aware of are:

  • Try to guess what pissed off the DRM, while being treated as an enemy at every level and step of logging and debugging.
  • Turn to the clear, communicative, well documented piracy community for help. Note that their solutions may not be strictly legal, but they tend to actually get me access to the thing i already paid for.
[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Trees appear green because they absorb red and blue light while reflecting green light. Maybe your TV is photosynthesising ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I just wanted to add to the list of unhelpful answers

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 days ago

Just that monitors don't redlect light, they emit light, and rules change

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

This happens when I try HW decoding on VLC on an old AMD card, the video has extra letterbox bars of this color (can be cropped manually by pressing C). At first I thought it's some default in the ITU-R BT.709 (YCbCr) colorspace used in most video codecs but those RGB values map to an uneven 55, 106, 100...

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 8 points 5 days ago

Yeah, I bet it's something to do with a video decoder trying to decode empty data (dropped or corrupted frame, etc.), and the result of that being converted from YCbCr to RGB, it's too consistent of a failure case.

[–] FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 days ago

The former flag of Libya

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 4 points 5 days ago

I have never had such a freakout. It generally just works.

[–] kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Well something in the graphics driver is breaking, so that color is probably unique to your hardware and drivers

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago

This happens to me as well when something goes wrong with video in Firefox. Perhaps something unique with software?

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