I have just installed openSUSE 13.1 (32-bit) on an HP Pavillion dv1040us. The desktop environment is KDE. I am using Firefox 31.0.
I also have installed Shockwave Flash 11.2.202.400.
When playing YouTube videos, the colors are off! People appear with a purplish skin color, for instance. Other objects appear with greenish or blueish hues…
In doing some online research, I found that it is recommended to turn off hardware acceleration in Flash. But when I right-click on a video and select Settings, the box that appears does not allow me to uncheck the Allow Hardware Acceleration option. (Basically, nothing happens when I click to uncheck the feature…)
How do I solve this problem? I really would like to stay with Firefox 31.0, when possible.
The window for Flash settings appears, but it is off color and hard to read because small. When I click on the box for the only setting that I can barely distinguish (which I’m assuming is the hardware acceleration option) nothing happens. The box on the left side of the hardware acceleration option appears to have a selection mark in it and I am unable to deselect that option.
Have you tried to reload the page after disabling the hardware acceleration?
After having disabled the hardware acceleration in Firefox? Yes.
Have you tried with a new user?
Yes. This appears to be a compatibility problem between the hardware (laptop is approx. ten years old!) and Flash Player for Linux, so it seems to show up no matter who the user is.
Changing the “enable_flash_uv_swap” option in /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg might fix your problem with hw acceleration as well.
I will try your suggestion this weekend and see what happens.
Using HTML5 should also work, but be aware that you will have to have the corresponding gstreamer-0_10-plugins from Packman installed then.
Where can I get instructions on where to find these plugins, how to install them, etc.?
Well, what display resolution are you using?
Maybe try to switch to a lower resolution to be able to hit that checkbox.
You can switch back to the standard resolution afterwards again, of course.
Or use some desktop zoom utility, kmag e.g. There’s also a “Zoom” desktop effect.
If that checkbox is ticked, hardware acceleration is on, yes.
After having disabled the hardware acceleration in Firefox? Yes.
Apparently you didn’t disable it at all, according to your description above.
Yes. This appears to be a compatibility problem between the hardware (laptop is approx. ten years old!) and Flash Player for Linux
No.
It might be a compatibility problem between Flash Player and your graphics driver.
And indeed such an incompatibility does exist between Flash Player and the nvidia driver at least.
Where can I get instructions on where to find these plugins, how to install them, etc.?
Do you have the Packman repo added to your system?
You can find it in YaST->Software Repositories->Add->Community Repositories.
Install the packages gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad-orig-addon, gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly-orig-addon, and gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ffmpeg in YaST->Software Management, that should give you the possibility to play back all files.
Btw, the same are used by KDE’s multimedia framework as well (with the default settings), so Dragon-Player and Amarok e.g. would profit, too.
I actually tried both a lower resolution and refresh rate. I ended up having to open a separate help thread because KDE would crash after I did that. I got the needed help and the problem is now fixed. (I don’t know if the KDE crashing was due to the lower resolution, refresh rate, or both.)
If that checkbox is ticked, hardware acceleration is on, yes.
Apparently you didn’t disable it at all, according to your description above.
What I did within Firefox is Options -> Advanced -> General and unchecked the “Use Hardware Acceleration When Available” option. However, when playing YouTube videos that does not solve the off-colors problem… It is with Adobe Flash Player hardware acceleration settings that I have troubles! (Right-click within any YouTube video, select Settings, a small window titled “Adobe Flash Player Settings” appears and I am unable to deselect the option “Enable Hardware Acceleration”.)
No.
It might be a compatibility problem between Flash Player and your graphics driver.
And indeed such an incompatibility does exist between Flash Player and the nvidia driver at least.
Do you have the Packman repo added to your system?
You can find it in YaST->Software Repositories->Add->Community Repositories.
Install the packages gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad-orig-addon, gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly-orig-addon, and gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ffmpeg in YaST->Software Management, that should give you the possibility to play back all files.
Btw, the same are used by KDE’s multimedia framework as well (with the default settings), so Dragon-Player and Amarok e.g. would profit, too.
The refresh rate should not matter at all, and the lower resolution should not make KDE crash either.
But there was a bug in the shipped intel driver which caused it to crash X on resolution changes.
Maybe that was your problem?
But if it is fixed now, you should be able to switch to a lower resolution to change that setting, no?
Can you point to that thread, so that I know what exactly you are talking about?
And desktop zoom still is an option as well, even when changing resolution would crash.
As I understand it, you cannot disable hardware acceleration because the settings window and the checkbox is too small.
What I did within Firefox is Options -> Advanced -> General and unchecked the “Use Hardware Acceleration When Available” option. However, when playing YouTube videos that does not solve the off-colors problem… It is with Adobe Flash Player hardware acceleration settings that I have troubles! (Right-click within any YouTube video, select Settings, a small window titled “Adobe Flash Player Settings” appears and I am unable to deselect the option “Enable Hardware Acceleration”.)
Yes, I know.
But you have to deselect the option “Enable Hardware Acceleration” in the small window titled “Adobe Flash Player Settings” to disable hardware acceleration in flash-player.
The other one has absolutely no effect on flash-player, it is for Firefox itself only.
There must be a file somewhere that has this “Enable Hardware Acceleration” flag set to ON (or whatever the setting syntax is!), don’t you think? If I knew where this file is, I could set hardware acceleration to OFF.
Well, apparently this is stored in ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol, but of course this is no user-editable text file…
But:
:~ cmp -b ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol.bak ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol
/home/wolfi/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol.bak /home/wolfi/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol differ: byte 116, line 2 is 0 ^@ 1 ^A
So, open the file in a hex editor (e.g. okteta or ghex) and change the byte at offset 115 (hex offset 0x73) from 0 to 1 to turn off hardware acceleration. (right, that’s no typo: 1 means off, and cmp starts to count at 1, so cmp’s byte #1 has actually offset 0)
I indeed have an integrated Intel graphics card. I have run “zypper up” and all updates are installed. Does not work.
Installed Okteta and edited file ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol. Option “Enable Hardware Acceleration” is now no longer selected in Settings. Does not work.
I am happy to report that I was able to solve the problem! Credit goes to this article:
This is what I did:
I went to YaST → Software Management, searched for “xf86-video-intel” (in my case it found version "xf86-video-intel-2.99.906), right-clicked on it, marked it for deletion, and then pressed Accept. (This step was not mentioned in the above-mentioned link!!)
I forgot to mention that after the “sudo make install” command I went to YaST -> Software Management, searched for “xf86-video-intel-2.99.914”, right-clicked on it, marked it for install, and then pressed Accept.
As I said, this doesn’t have any effect on the flash-player. That option is only for Firefox itself.
Changed the “enable_flash_uv_swap” option to “disable_flash_uv_swap” option in /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg. Does not work.
That’s wrong.
You should change “enable_flash_uv_swap=1” to “enable_flash_uv_swap=0” (or vice-versa).
I thought that was obvious.
Installed gstreamer-0_10-plugins from Packman. Does not work.
Again, this is only used for HTML5. Flash-player is a completely different beast.
Installed Okteta and edited file ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol. Option “Enable Hardware Acceleration” is now no longer selected in Settings. Does not work.
Well, then it’s probably not caused by the hardware acceleration.
So apparently it is a driver bug that’s fixed in a later version.
You would not have had to compile the driver yourself though, a package should be available from OBS as well.
And you should not have had to uninstall the old version in YaST. If you install the new driver to /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/updates/drivers/ it is preferred over the installed one. (that directory is intended for using updated drivers instead of the ones installed by the system)
You did what?
Your above steps do not make the new intel driver available in YaST.
So either you installed the old version now again (which is ok if the newer version is in that updates directory I mentioned), or you installed the newer driver from an additional repo which makes the above steps to manually compile and install the intel driver completely unnecessary and useless of course.
