[x86_64] Flash (sometimes) shows only white window when playing youtube videos

[Bryce Harrington]

Binary package hint: flashplugin-nonfree

[Problem]
Flash movies (e.g. youtube and youtube-like sites) seem to begin playing but instead show a blank white window.

[Steps to Reproduce]
1. Boot up Ubuntu
2. Start a music player (I used audacious) in the background
3. Start firefox, navigate to youtube.com or similar site
4. Select any video, load it and play
5. A progress bar will flash, and then window immediately turns white
6. Exit music player
7. Reloading the page and re-playing video has no effect
9. With music player off, repeat steps 3-4; this time video should play

[Discussion]
I'm not 100% sure I've got the reproduction steps exactly right in the above, however I've noticed a strong correlation between having the music player up and seeing the flash player break.

I recently also noticed a number of stray /tmp/flash* cruft when firefox was not loaded, but have not yet definitively associated their presence with one of these failures. I've also noticed some mentions of nsviewer.bin crashes in dmesg; again not definitively associated with these whitescreen events, but seem suspicious.

I've had a number of problems in jaunty relating to pulseaudio, so my guess would be that flash is hanging when other things are using the pulseaudio system.

[System environment]
ubuntu: Jaunty (development version)
linux: 2.6.28-4-generic #10-Ubuntu SMP x86_64
firefox-3.0: Installed: 3.0.5+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
flashplugin-nonfree: Installed: 10.0.15.3ubuntu2

[Chris Wyatt (wyattmeister)]

Having a similar thing in Karmic where Flash sometimes appears blank, never had the issue in Jaunty though.