Tip: Adobe Flash Player: fix pink screen and Firefox crashes

In the latest version of Adobe Flash Player, 10.2, there’s a “great” feature (not…): hardware acceleration. Enabled by default.

On many video cards (roughly all but Nvidia’s running on the closed Nvidia driver), this causes pink screens in Flash video’s and even Firefox crashes. Both in Firefox 3.x and in Firefox 4.x.

The solution is, thankfully, rather simple: disable hardware acceleration. As follows:

  • Visit this website: Moodstream™ by Getty Images
    (or any other that uses a special kind of flash content, not Youtube, which uses a different kind!)

  • Wait until the content has loaded. Then rightclick with your mouse on the screen - Settings - remove the check at hardware acceleration.

  • Go to Youtube and play a random video. The problem should be solved.

Have fun! openSUSE 11.4 rocks, and so does Firefox 4. :slight_smile:

Also something to note: Firefox 4 has it’s own hardware acceleration (FF 3.6 didn’t), which is also enabled by default. But this particular hardware acceleration doesn’t seem to create any problems at all, at least not on my machines.

There is no connection between the Flash video problems and the hardware acceleration of Firefox 4 itself, because the Flash problems also exist on Firefox 3.x, which has no hardware acceleration of it’s own.

So I think we may conclude that the hardware acceleration of Adobe Flash Player, is a standalone problem of Adobe Flash Player only.