I was getting random crackling sounds while playing certain Youtube videos in Chrome, especially in Theater or fullscreen mode.
Symptoms and other observations:
- crackling sounds are random and they occur only in some videos
- it's super-annoying
- only Chrome is affected (Firefox and Edge are both fine)
- it happens only with Youtube videos (VLC or Jellyfin playback is fine, for example)
- when hardware acceleration is disabled in Chrome settings, the problem goes away
What did not help:
- updating the graphics driver
- updating Chrome
- disabling certain codecs (using the enhanced-h264ify extension)
Solution:
For me, the right solution was to change the graphics backend that Chrome uses (from Direct3D to OpenGL).
How to do it:
- navigate to chrome://flags
- search for "graphics backend"
- select OpenGL from the Choose ANGLE graphics backend list of options
- finally enjoy a clean sound without cracklings!