According to some complaints on the MacRumors forum, some 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro users suffered a kernel crash while watching HDR YouTube videos. As the reader Cababah explained, watching HDR YouTube videos in the Safari browser, and then scrolling through the comments, there will be a kernel error on macOS Monterey 12.0.1.
Watching YouTube in full screen and then exiting full-screen mode can also cause this error. It mainly affects models with 16GB RAM, although 32GB/64GB models may also be affected. The error has been reproduced by multiple people, and it seems to happen when watching some YouTube videos. After some users turn off full-screen playback, the Mac computer will be completely shut down and restarted. Some users can make it do this almost every time when watching videos with M1 Pro 16.
Join RealMi Central on Telegram, Facebook & Twitter
This problem is encountered when playing 4K HDR YouTube on Safari/Chrome. At first, users thought it might be some errors in the Chrome browser, but later it crashed in the Safari browser. Some MacBook Pro users speculate that this is an AV1 decoding problem, but it is still unclear what the specific problem is or whether it can be solved by a software update. Not all MacBook Pro users see this problem.
The macOS Monterey 12.1 version under test may solve this problem in the future.