Fixing a very odd issue with macOS Ventura and Firefox/DaVinci Resolve crashing

Two blog posts in one day? Someone must be on break (spoiler alert, that is true). Anyway, I wanted to quickly write about a fun issue I was having with my Mac and my solution so the wider internet can know about a potential fix.

In short, when I upgraded my Mac to macOS Ventura, I noticed that DaVinci Resolve simply failed to start entirely. It would crash when initializing and would not go further. I also noticed that on some websites, Firefox just crashed entirely which was odd.

Two Ventura updates later and we’re on Ventura 13.2 with these crashes still happening, and I’m trying to figure out why this isn’t working. Thankfully, Firefox was crashing whenever I tried to visit the Jira instance for where I work, so I was able to repeatedly get the issue to show up. A couple dives into the Firefox crash report & Bugzilla later and I noticed a comment saying to remove this file:

/Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/RelayCam.plugin

And with this file gone, Firefox stopped crashing and DaVinci Resolve worked again. The reason this was happening was surprisingly simple and stupid. I had installed Mersive Solstice in 2020 since my university has the Solstice PODs. But I found the app to be clunky and the screen mirroring to be laggy, so I uninstalled the app and just resorted to using an HDMI cable instead (as most AV setups at my school have hardwire options).

When I uninstalled Solstice, I must’ve just dragged it into the trash can and that didn’t mean the plugin got removed from my system. After uninstalling Solstice, I still had the option to select the Solstice camera, but I think I got rid of that by uninstalling some kexts. Nonetheless all this was prior to Ventura coming out.

Anyway, Ventura came out and I guess this plugin just makes random apps crash on Ventura. How odd. At the end of the day, if you installed (then uninstalled) Solstice and find Firefox or DaVinci Resolve to be randomly crashing, you can safely remove this file and stop the crashes in their tracks.