I am using two Chromium-based browsers on my system: Wavebox and Vivaldi. Vivaldi is my everyday browser and Wavebox takes the place of dozens of Electron-based applications, like Discord or Google Chat.
Recently, my CPU usage would spike as soon as both browsers were running. Opening the Task Manager in both applications revealed a CPU usage of 50% for a process called “Utility: Video Capture”. This only happens when both browsers are open, leading me to believe that this is a bug in Chromium itself.
I don’t need nor want video capture on Vivaldi.
On Windows, your best bet to disable the process is to create a new registry key that disables the feature altogether. Trying to mess around with flags within the browser did not yield any results.
I will use Vivaldi as an example here, however a similar procedure should be applicable to most Chromium-based browsers.
Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Vivaldi.
If the key does not exist yet, create it. Within the “Vivaldi” key, create a DWORD32 named “VideoCaptureAllowed” and set its value to 0.
After restarting Vivaldi, the process no longer burns through my CPU cycles.
