Wrong tint in flash when it uses video acceleration

[Aloysius]

Using Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit, nvidia binary driver, youtube videos show blue faces after the upgrade to flashplugin 11.2.
Didn't occur with 11.1.

See example at: http://i.imgur.com/S58GP.jpg

SRU description

[IMPACT]

 * Flash videos have the wrong tint ("blue faces") on Precise when
   using nvidia-current or nvidia-current-updates.

 * This effectively renders Flash videos unwatchable for all LTS users
   with an NVidia video card.

[TESTCASE]

 * Install nvidia-current, view any Flash video on YouTube,
   eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkVBXW4JeUI.

 * Reproducable with various Nvidia video cards from at least the
   GeForce 8 series up to the GeForce 600 series.

 * Screenshot included in Aloysius' original bug description.

[Regression Potential]

 * While Stephen Warren's patch is not exactly a one-liner, it is
   rather straightforward and only changes libvdpau's behaviour for
   Flash.

 * On the off-chance that this change causes instability, it can be
   easily disabled via vdpau_wrapper.cfg.

 * The patch is widely tested, is included in upstream since 0.5 and
   has been backported for 0.4.1 by the Debian team. The fix is
   included in Quantal (0.4.1-6ubuntu1).

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

I can't reproduce this. Latest flash works fine here with amd64 11.10 and the 280.13-0ubuntu6 driver.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

Using nvidia 9800GT, setting EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1 in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg solved the problem.
Using driver 295.33-0ubuntu1~oneiric~xup1 haven't tested back with 280.13-0ubuntu6.

[Joshua R. Poulson (jrp)]

This also happens on precise with 11.2.202.228-0precise1 on my nvidia-based system

Appears to be related to https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3109467

[Vladimir Skvortsov (vskvortsoff)]

I submitted the duplicate of this bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/+bug/968036

[Adrian (anoland)]

Happened to me after the recent updates.

Ubuntu 10.10
Nvidia binary: 285.05.09
video card: GeForce 240M
linux 2.6.35-32-generic

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

It would be great if someone tried different combinations of OverrideGPUValidation and EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode in the /etc/adobe/mms.cfg file to see if there's a workaround.

See:
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3109467
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguinswf/2008/08/secrets_of_the_mmscfg_file_1.html

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

It's bizarre. I removed /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and now everything works.

For some reason youtube clips show "software video rendering" and "software video decoding"
now, although they were both set as hardware just yesterday, or hardware and software respectively when the problem was occurring.

(Also I'm back on the stock nvidia 280.13-0ubuntu6 driver)

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

The flash package never shipped /etc/adobe/mms.cfg, so that's probably a file you created yourself.

Is anyone else having issues after removing /etc/adobe/mms.cfg?

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

OK, so with my test laptop.

No mms.cfg, no libvdpau1 = flash works fine

after installing libvdpau1 = wrong tint (LP: #967091)

after adding "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1" to mms.cfg = black flash video (LP: #967182)
after adding "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1" and "OverrideGPUValidation=true" to mms.cfg = flash works fine

YMMV.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

I created /etc/adobe/mms.cfg when trying to address the problem.

Anyway, I've noticed that blue faces appear only when the "accelerated video rendering " "software video decoding" combination.
If the latter is accelerated as well (via EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1) colours are fine but the plugin is very unstable.

On the other hand, with "software video rendering" and "software video decoding" things are perfect (lower speed notwisthanding), but as you pointed out the only way to disable the acceleration in the former is by removing libvdpau1, since the "Enable Hardware Acceleration" option in the settings is uncheckable.

Now, it would be nice to know if there is a way to keep libvdpau1 for other uses...

[Joshua R. Poulson (jrp)]

On precise: No mms.cfg for me, but I did have libvdpau. I created a mms.cfg and was able to fix the tiny, but it made Flash highly unstable.

[Joshua R. Poulson (jrp)]

Looks like there's a fix for vdpau described here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2518770&postcount=104

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

Disabling hardware acceleration at all while keeping libvdpau1 would be the best short-term solution, IMHO.
Unfortunately it's impossible to do so via the settings menu, since it's not possible to uncheck "Enable Hardware Acceleration".

I've found the relevant setting to be into ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol and I have a working copy of it from another installation that somehow works, but even with a 1-1 comparison with the default file I couldn't identify the correct variable to set.

[dobey (dobey)]

Unchecking "Enable Hardware Acceleration" in Flash works for me, but you have to reload the page, after doing so. It doesn't take effect with the currently running instance of the plug-in.

However, it also more than doubles CPU usage for me. And for some reason, I have so far only encountered this problem on YouTube, or sites embedding YouTube videos. Watching a video on Vimeo seems to work fine for me, as does videos on South Park Studios.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

@dobey: I tried like you said, but the settings window gets stuck and no button is responsive.
Clicking anyway and reloading doesn't do anything on my system.

[ambossarm (ambossarm)]

vimeo videos with flash are playing fine. youtube HTML5 videos also play fine. I tried a webM video with HTML and with flash, the blue faces where only there with flash.

A blue shirt was displayed as yellow (so it is a total mix, not only a blue filter)

After mkdir /etc/adobe and adding the next to lines to /etc/adobe/mms.cfg:
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=true

the colors are fine. (Problem solved)

Another (perhaps related) problem is that I have a transparent overlay of the flashplayer in KVIrc. It is over the background but under the font, it looks like a nice feature (video as background in chat). It will not be on a screenshot, but the gnome screenshot tool does also have that video as background effect.

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

Adobe is refusing to fix the bug--or perhaps I should say, they're sticking their heads in the sand, claiming they can't reproduce it, in spite of numerous reports on their own bug tracker and across the Internet:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1079711#p1079711
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3136745

A few days ago it was fine--now, after Flash was upgraded, everything's blue.

Disabling hardware acceleration is not a solution--it's simply a workaround for a major regression. And it seems that the "trace patch" is an "ugly hack", so it's probably not eligible for distributing in Ubuntu.

Something's got to be done, though. We all know that Adobe is abandoning Flash on Linux, but are they really going to leave us with this broken mess? Is this going to be their "farewell"? Can Ubuntu and other distros exert some pressure to get them to fix it? If all it really is is that the color planes are reversed, it would probably take all of 5 minutes for one guy to fix it--probably a one-line patch.

[axel (axel334)]

I support this Adam's idea. Canonical should ask Adobe to repair flash or make previous version available in repositories. I read that it was the last flash plugin for Firefox, so it should just work for people who still want to use it. Make sure that solution will be available for Natty as well.

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

So far Adobe's response is:

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3109467

"thanks for your support Adobe Flash and report this issue. But we do not support Linux anymore post 11.2"

Is this a parting shot at Linux users? A few days ago it worked fine--today it's broken. And they refuse to fix it? So our choice is between using a version with known security holes or having people turn into smurfs in YouTube videos?

[Vladimir Skvortsov (vskvortsoff)]

FYI: Archived (previous) Flash Player versions are located at http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html

[axel (axel334)]

@ Vladimir Skvortsov (vskvortsoff)
Thank you.
I downloaded fp_11.1.102.63_archive.zip unpacked, removed all flash with synaptic and copied to locations as is described here:
http://scottlinux.com/2011/07/14/install-flash-player-11-in-linux-mint-debian-edition-64bit/
It worked for Opera and Chromium. I also created
/home/user/.mozilla/plugins
and copied libflashplayer.so there, which worked for Firefox.
Now about:plugins in firefox shows Shockwave Flash 11.1 r102
You can also block flash in Synaptic, so that you don't update again to the broken version accidentally.

[Mateusz Stachowski (stachowski-mateusz)]

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 11.10 (adobe-flashplugin 11.2.202.228-0oneiric1) and nVidia GeForce 9600 GT.

sudo mkdir /etc/adobe
echo -e "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1\nOverrideGPUValidation=true" | sudo tee /etc/adobe/mms.cfg > /dev/null

Those commands resolved it no more problems with colors.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

For some people, EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode makes Flash Player unstable – if that's your case, consider another options which I've summed up here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/968647/comments/16
So far all the solutions we have are hacks and workarounds for Flash Player's faulty behaviour.

Again, only the players using Stage Video are affected – namely YouTube, Brightcove, and Viddler. See http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stagevideo.html – especially the demo with The Big Buck Bunny is useful to experience the bug and compare the CPU usage.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

Does it mean that if using the libvdpau patch the colours would appear swapped on players other than Stage Video?

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Aloysius: No, Stage Video is a feature of Flash Player which allows Flash applications to use hardware acceleration – most Flash video players (including Vimeo) rely on software rendering which doesn't use VDPAU at all.
Other desktop video players (like VLC or Totem) also aren't affected. libvdpau fix is "opt-in" – it swaps colours only for applications with VDPAU_TRACE environment variable enabled. It could, however, affect the native "HTML5" video in web browsers.

The current libvdpau patch is hack because it uses vdpau_trace library for unrelated purpose and removes the original functionality.
On the other hand it's a proof of concept how the proper and out-of-the-box workaround could work – swap the colours for some applications. Unfortunately it's a very crude method; AFAIK there's no way to detect which application sends data to VDPAU so we have to rely on environment variables. And that would mean to patch all the browsers (not to mention applications which can embed Flash through some web view widgets like GtkHtml) – unless there's some way to wrap the Flash Plugin's library invocation.

[Renato S. Yamane (renatoyamane)]

I'm having the same problem:

flashplugin-installer: 11.2.202.228ubuntu1
nvidia-current: 295.33-0ubuntu1
Kubuntu 12.04 64 bits.

To fix it, just go to www.youtube.com/html5 and ENABLE html5 instead flash.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

Enabling html5 wouldn't exactly be a "fix". Also it would require keeping tracking cookies.

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

The workaround in comment #22 doesn't fix it for me. The colors are still off when watching the Stage Video videos. And on top of that, now Flash crashes regularly.

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

To clarify, after doing:

$ echo -e "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1\nOverrideGPUValidation=true" | sudo tee /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

Then on YouTube, 360p and 480p videos had proper tint. But 720p videos still were blue. And Flash crashed regularly. After removing that file, all YouTube videos are tinted blue, and Flash doesn't crash.

[pst007x (turone)]

Try this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/117127/flash-video-appears-blue

[pst007x (turone)]

And this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/968489

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

This affects me too since yesterdays updates as far as I can tell. before that all youtube videos in 12.04 showed up normal. HTML5 Videos as well as local videos in VLC and so on are definately not affected. Also it only seems to affect videos as flashplayer animations in flash show red color as intended.

#26 only fixes the problem for HTML5 Videos not for Youtube H264 videos.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

I'm trying the vdpau_trace patch and it seems to be working well so far.
I wonder if it would really be unthinkable to include it in the next releases.

[axel (axel334)]

I was wrong in saying in comment #21 that you can block it in Synaptic. After uninstall I don't see anything to bock. Just to correct my mistake. But going back to previous version worked for me. Opera, Firefox and Chromium work fine.
For Opera it might be necessary to do:
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins
I have natty 32-bit. The same should work for 64-bit.

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

I only experienced the problem on youtube so far. vimeo and others don't seem to be affected.

[Ole Jon Bjørkum (olejonbj)]

Same problem here (NVIDIA). Enbling HW-acceleration in mms.cfg solves it, but makes it way to unstable on my 64-bit laptop (though HW-acceleration works great on my 32-bit HTPC).

Removing VDPAU is not a solution at all. It will disable HW-acceleration on all video, and I have a lot of packages that depend on it.

[Ole Jon Bjørkum (olejonbj)]

Downloaded 11.1 and put it libflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (works in Chrome as well).

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_11.1.102.63_archive.zip

Not a very good idea to use an old version of Flash, though (security...)

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

To my knowledge (and from my tests) Flash Player 11.1 doesn't support Stage Video HW acceleration on Linux, 11.2 is the first version which supports hardware decoding through VDPAU (and therefore causes this bug).
By downgrading to Flash Player 11.1 you probably won't get HW accelerated video, but you will definitely get known security vulnerability, see http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb12-07.html – while the first one seems to be WIndows only, the second one (CVE-2012-0773) allows an arbitrary code execution on all platforms. But hey, it's your call.

If you still want to downgrade, Flash Player 10.3 is maintained, see http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html#main_Archived_versions – it is possible this version also supports EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode without crashing so often (I've not tested it).

Again, currently the easiest/most stable/safest way to fix colours is to disable hardware acceleration in Flash Player Display settings: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help01.html
If the Settings window doesn't respond to clicks, switch to Unity 2D, uncheck the box and switch back to standard Unity.

[swiftgeek (swiftgeek)]

(64-bit, hwaccel enabled in /etc , opera-next and chromium)
HWAccel works with YouTube site, but embedded yt player crashes all instances of flashplugin (eg. http://www.joemonster.org/filmy/43422/Skyrim_w_wykonaniu_Lindsey_Stirling ). But embedded player alone, eg. " http://www.youtube.com/v/BSLPH9d-jsI " works fine.

Detailed info about crash with export "VDPAU_TRACE=1" http://pastebin.com/tJrXXqFk

[swiftgeek (swiftgeek)]

Also i have noticed that with changes in "/etc/adobe" and "VDPAU_TRACE=1" flashplugin is "reserving" pure white instead of usual black

[Doug McMahon (mc3man)]

While in unity-3d hwaccel can be enabled or disabled in the flash window only when one full-screens the player window.
It usually takes 2 clicks to to do.
The settings window does not respond when scrollbars are present, hence going to fullscreen

[Antoine Grondin (antoinegrondin)]

Same problem with nVidia GTX 460 (drivers 295.20), when running flash videos in Youtube with Google Chrome 18.0.1025.151. Disabling hardware accel seems to be a workaround. I'm on Ubuntu 10.04 64 bits with latest updates (as of today).

[Colin Mills (cm006a5077)]

Same problem with Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit) after the latest flash update (7/4/2102).

[Rudyard Kipling (htx)]

Same problem with maverick (10.10) x86, NVidia 9600M GT, using the latest binary NVidia drivers (295.20). Enabling both hardware acceleration and rendering causes instability (every other video crashes the plugin-container process in Firefox), enabling hardware acceleration and software render causes blue tint, and enabling software acceleration and render - bad performance and high CPU load. I guess the third option is the lesser evil, but it gets quite annoying when it starts dropping ~100-200 frames on a 4 minute 720p video.

[Jochen Fahrner (jofa)]

This also happens to me in Avidemux (GTK) with a webm (VP8) video from Youtube. Nvidia driver is installed.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Confirming Jochen's report, Avidemux with WebM videos is – in my case – affected too. Good catch, however I am not quite sure this is related to Flash Player's problem.

FLV streams used by the YouTube flash player are H.264 encoded and Avidemux plays those just fine.
Also VDPAU support in Avidemux is available since (experimental) v2.6, package for Ubuntu is v2.5 and I am not sure whether Ubuntu versions of libvdpau support VP8 at all.
Anyway I think this should be a separate bug report against Avidemux, I would suspect decoder plugin or libvpx to be the cause.

Also my thanks to Doug, Flash Player's Settings window does respond in fullscreen. That's much better than having to switch to Unity 2D.

[NY00123 (ny00)]

I confirm this too now. What's strange is that I've noticed this only today, less than a hour from now.

However, this may be a bit irrelevant as I'm using an unofficial NVidia driver, version 295.33-0ubuntu1~oneiric~xup1 (version of nvidia-current and nvidia-settings packages).

I'd still add these details, though:
- I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 for the x86_64 arch.
- Version of flashplugin-installer (and flashplugin-downloader:i386?): 11.2.202.228ubuntu0.11.10.1
- Graphics card's chip is GTX 460.

[Ximin Luo (infinity0)]

I'm on debian wheezy/sid and recently upgraded to './install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz' and this bug has hit me too. Disabling hardware acceleration via settings fixes it.

[enedene (enedene)]

If this bug stays till Ubuntu 12.04 is out, that will be a disaster, vast majority of users use youtube.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

@enedene
Problem is there is no easy solution unless Adobe steps in.

[Jochen Fahrner (jofa)]

That's the question, if this is Adobes fault or if it's a bug in libvdpau. Since this also happens in Avidemux, I think it's not Adobes fault.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

Could it be nvidia's?

[Serhiy (xintx-ua)]

Could it be red and blue channels swapped?

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

U and V chrominance components are swapped which basically looks the same as swapped R and B (we are in YUV color space).
Pierre-Loup Griffais (aka Plagman) from Nvidia has already created the patch for libvdpau – http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=2518770#post2518770 – which is intended as hack. If it really was Nvidia's problem we'd have seen the fix already, the bug is known since FP 11.2 beta.
As Plagman explains: "The problem only happens when Flash uses software decoding but VDPAU for presentation; it swaps two arguments of the call to upload the video data into VDPAU in that case." (http://bit.ly/HVK747)

Avidemux bug is unrelated, it affects only VP8 videos and VDPAU is not involved – I can reproduce the same problem on any hardware.

The newer thread on Nvidia forums – http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=177380 – points to VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY environment variable which seems as even better workaround than disabling hardware acceleration in Flash Player.

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

I've been using the vdpau_trace patch successfully for a few days now. Will try the VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY workaround now.

Does it have any drawbacks, performance/feature-wise?

[palimmo (palimmo)]

Ubuntu 12.04 beta2 64bit.
Nvidia G105M
    File: libflashplayer.so
    Version:
    Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202
Driver Nvidia Current [Recommended] 295.33

Solved unabling Hardware acceleration (I had to login in Ubuntu 2d)

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

Setting VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1 doesn't solve the colour channel inversion nor does anything to improve the plugin stability when using hardware video decoding (both on oneiric and precise).

At least for me.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Indeed, VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY alone doesn't fix the problem, but - in my case - combined with EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1 it seems to really improve Flash Player's stability. Also the CPU usage is noticeably lower, I assume that video decoding in this case is actually offloaded to GPU.
Maybe I am just lucky with no crashes, I will observe the behaviour closely, anyway there's at least one other user with the same results as me - http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=177380#7 - so hopefully it's not just a coincidence.

What may affect the stability in Firefox is the layers.acceleration.force-enabled switch, but it's disabled by default (for a very good reason) unless you have explicitly enabled it.

Ubuntu 11.10 x64
nvidia-current 295.33 with GeForce GTS 250
adobe-flashplugin 11.2.202.228
Firefox 11.0

[darthanubis (darthanubis)]

All things being equal besides having Nvidia driver installed, my Acer laptop with Intel onboard video 12.04 does NOT suffer from this bug. I think that rules out flash. Only my Nvidia desktop has this probelm.

[Michael (amemain)]

"Again, currently the easiest/most stable/safest way to fix colours is to disable hardware acceleration in Flash Player Display settings: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help01.html
If the Settings window doesn't respond to clicks, switch to Unity 2D, uncheck the box and switch back to standard Unity."

"While in unity-3d hwaccel can be enabled or disabled in the flash window only when one full-screens the player window.
It usually takes 2 clicks to to do.
The settings window does not respond when scrollbars are present, hence going to fullscreen"

^^ Thank you to both of you, simple and easy fix for the time being.

[Jochen Fahrner (jofa)]

@darthanubis: it's not necessarily the Nvidia driver. There are several possibilites for this fault.
1. Flashplayer is calling functions in libvdpau (the interface for Nvidia HW acceleration) with wrong arguments.
2. libvdpau is calling driver functions with wrong arguments
3. Nvidia driver is faulty.

You don't see this bug with nouveau driver, because noveau offers no hw acceleration.

[Cson (theceason)]

if we can't disable hw acceleration in unity 3d
that is a bug for ubuntu

[Ivan (trurl-master)]

If the settings window doesn't respond to clicks you don't have to switch to Unity 2D to disable hw accel, just open video to fullscreen.

[darthanubis (darthanubis)]

Fixed in Chrome after today's updates. Kubuntu 12.04 x64

[darthanubis (darthanubis)]

Still broken in Firefox though.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Cannot confirm with Chrome 19.0.1084.15 beta (in today's updade), once HW acceleration is enabled, I still get the wrong tint. Looking at Chromium's revisions within current and two previous betaversions – http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/perf/dashboard/ui/changelog.html?url=%2Ftrunk%2Fsrc&range=129054%3A130829&mode=html – I haven't found any Flash video related fixes, at least not for the current NPAPI version.

An update for Nvidia driver, v295.40, was also released today – once I have updated the driver, I've got correct tint in Firefox with hardware acceleration and without any other tweaks (mms.cfg, VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY). This was, however, only temporary since the new driver wasn't fully loaded, after the reboot all went back to the "normal" state.

Reiterating my previous post about VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY with EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1, Flash Player tends to become gradually unstable over time and often crashes on some operations (video seeking), so I can't fully recommend this workaround – but your experience may vary.

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

Definately not fixes. The strange thing is that i only have this Problem on my 32-bit install (btrfs, laptop, dailybuild before beta1 updated to the most recent 12.04)

My 64-bit install that i upgraded from 11.10 is not affected at all.

Both systems have nvidia cards. the 32bit system has a Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT and the 64bit install has a Geforce 9800 GTX.

Does anyone know if there are any caches of the flashplayer that have to be cleared after the upgrade?

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Sven: Cache in this case doesn't matter, Flash Player settings (Hardware acceleration option) do – all is stored in ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player
Maybe you don't use the latest series of Nvidia driver (2xx), use older version of Flash Player (only 11.2 is affected) or you don't have libvdpau1 installed.

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

I installed the system new cause i wanted a 64Bit on my laptop and resize partitions anyway and now its definately fixes so i guess the problem was in the ~/.macromedia which i did not delete before.

The issue is definately solved for me.

[Matthew Gregg (mcg)]

Removing ~/.macromedia seems to fix the problem for me as well.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Deleting ~/.macromedia doesn't work for me – Flash Player's Hardware acceleration option is reverted to the default (enabled) state and videos have wrong tint again.

[markb (mark-blakeney)]

Not only does removing ~/.macromedia not work, but now I can not deselect "enable hardware acceleration" anymore in my flash settings. So warning, don't take the advice of comment #70!

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

How kind of Adobe, they updated Flash but didn't fix this bug:

flashplugin-nonfree (11.2.202.233ubuntu0.11.10.3) oneiric-security; urgency=low

  * New upstream release 11.2.202.233
    - debian/flashplugin-installer.{config,postinst.in}: Updated version
      and sha256sum.

 -- Steve Beattie <email address hidden> Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:44:46 -0700

Does someone at Adobe have an anti-Linux agenda? Why would they add this bug into the "last release for Linux," and then not fix it? Especially when it's as simple as swapping the order of the color channels. There's no excuse for not fixing it.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

I don't see an anti-Linux agenda, the fact is just that Adobe doesn't give a f**k.

The best chance is to annoy Adobe until they fix it - and for now it seems that Adobe's staff is listening but they're sticking to their "Can't reproduce".
I've added my two bits and you should too: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3164063

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

I revert what i said. after todays updates the bug is definately NOT fixed for me. it was fixed but it occured again on my big PC. was there a libvpau update recently?

cause i think it may not even be connected to flash at all.

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

It worked for me again when i did "sudo apt-get purge libvdpau1"

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Uninstalling libvdpau1 is a known workaround. You have removed hardware video decoding support which may result in higher CPU usage during video playback and reduced video performance and quality especially with HD videos. This may or may not be a big deal for you, but removing libvdpau1 is not a definite solution anyway.

As Stephen Warren explained, libvdpau is not the component to blame here because:
"libvdpau is just a wrapper library that is used to locate the vendor-specific VDPAU driver. The problem is either in the Ubuntu desktop environment (window manager/compositor), the application which uses VDPAU (e.g. Adobe Flash) or the VDPAU driver itself (e.g. NVIDIA driver)."
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/968489/comments/14)

I wish we could blame some other project because there's a better chance of fixing this bug (even with Nvidia's binary drivers), but so far the ball is in Adobe's court.

[hdante (hdante)]

One month with this bug and mantainers haven't downgraded the flash version, while the problem is being fixed

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Downgrading the flash version isn't an option, as that would put users at a major security risk.

[Matt Pharoah (mpharoah)]

The "remove NVidia's vieo hardware acceleration" workaround (remove libvdpau1) solved both this problem AND the even more annoying "flash videos show up in all white pixels of the screen when firefox is minized" bug.

Adding the lines to the config file, on the other hand, fixed the swapped red/blue filters, but not the flash drawing where's it's not supposed to bug, plus it made flash even more unstable than it already is.

Unless you plan on watching videos and playing 3d games at the same time, removing libvdpau1 is probably the better option. (And even then...)

[sven (post-svennielsen)]

Other optional workaround:

I have been using Firefox Add-On "FlashVideoReplacer" for some time now, as (software rendered) flash videos are too much for my little notebook. I like it, it replaces the embedded flash with the Totem/vlc/mplayer plug-in (depending on what you have installed), or optionally opens the falsh video in a separate mplayer instance (smplayer is my favorite)

This way, you have hardware accl and correct colors.

Well, sometimes the streaming is too slow, when viewing Hi-Res, but on 360p/480p it usually works fine.

[bowser (bwbernard-wong1)]

It only affects Youtube and only when you have a Nvidia card. The most elegant solution is to simply not use flash for Youtube. Install the flashvideoreplacer addon for Firefox and use the gecko-mediaplayer as the backend. It works better than flash anyway, and you can get hardware accelearation via vdpau (since it is mplayer)

If you don't use firefox, install the latest smplayer from rvm's ppa, it has a Youtube viewer, and since it is mplayer you get great hardware acceleration via vdpau.

[Linards Ticmanis (ticmanis)]

"Importance: Undecided, Assigned To:Unassigned" Is it only me who thinks this must be a bad joke?

This affects lots of people (not that many bugs have close to 250 people saying they're affected, in reality it probably affects 1000s), using a very popular brand of GPUs, on a very popular web site.

If Ubuntu can't ship a fix, then ship a workaround, for heaven's sake. If flashplayer is unmaintained, it's time to throw it out and go with one of the clones, even if they're not perfect. There *will* be bad security holes discovered even in 11.2 at some point in the not too far future, you can bet on that.

If there's any way I can help to make that happen, please tell me. Thank you!

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

We can't ship a fix, or a workaround. We've communicated the issue to Adobe. That's is the only thing we can do.

[Linards Ticmanis (ticmanis)]

Why exactly can't you ship a workaround like one of those discussed here and in the linked sites?

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Because the workaround is different depending on what model of graphics hardware you have, so there's no one-fit solution to the problem. Also, Adobe needs to approve any modifications to the flashplugin package before we can redistribute the workaround.

This issue only affects users that have both installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers and libvdpau. The best and simplest workaround is to simply uninstall libvdpau until either Adobe or Nvidia fix the issue.

[Jochen Fahrner (jofa)]

Why can't you say Goodbye to Adobe Flash?
Apple could do. Why not Ubuntu?

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

[Alistair Buxton (a-j-buxton)]

@mdeslaur: The best workaround is to disable hardware acceleration in flash. Removing vdpau will break the large amount of software that uses it correctly. Also, the bug only affects nvidia users because only nvidia cards and one extremely obscure S3 chipset provide vdpau support. If anyone has tested this on a S3 Chrome 400 card with vdpau drivers installed, I would be extremely interested in the result.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Bleeding-edge open-source Radeon driver may be also affected as mentioned by Udovdh in duplicated bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/968647/comments/22 - the status is Work In Progress so VDPAU support is probably available in Git version. Could anyone test this?

@jofa:
$ sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin
You are welcome.

[Linards Ticmanis (ticmanis)]

Ok, just wondering if I understand this right (this is a real question not sarcasm): the Ubuntu people can't update Precise so that hardware acceleration for Flash is disabled out-of-the-box on the affected systems, at least for the moment? Because Adobe would have to allow it and currently they don't? Would they still have to allow it if the bug-fixing file was moved to another package on which the flashplugin packages could then depend?

Can we maybe help by bugging people at Adobe? Who would I need to contact?

Of course I know now that all I have to do is disable hardware acceleration. But I still think it would be great if other people (who might not know what do do about such a bug at all) didn't have to search high and low for an answer. So far Ubuntu has been "The Linux That Just Kinda Works" - would be great if that reputation could be kept. Even a message directing people to disable this hardware acceleration that appears at the first browser start, or when first playing a likely-to-be-affected video, would help.

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Does flash have a system-wide setting to disable hardware acceleration?

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

As far as I know, there's no option to disable HW acceleration globally (e.g. through /etc/adobe/mms.cfg - Administration Guide for Flash Player mentions only OverrideGPUValidation). I think the hardware acceleration option is stored in ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol but I'm not sure which key is it.

One could create some shell script which would replace/modify settings.sol for the user who runs it therefore making the process seamless ("run this to magically fix smurfs in the Flash Player").

@ticmanis: Bugging Adobe is definitely the way to go, everyone should at least upvote this issue: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3164063

[Linards Ticmanis (ticmanis)]

Alright, I voted this up on the Adobe site given by jnv: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3164063 so everybody who is affected, PLEASE make an account there and vote for it too. It's got only three votes so far which is clearly not enough.

As for a workaround, if there is really no global setting to disable HW acceleration, my vote would go to modifying all users' Flash settings files (including default new user template) during libvdpau installation, or during flashplayer installation, whichever occurs later. Shouldn't that be possible?

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

The settings.sol file seems to be in some kind of binary format, I don't believe we can safely write a script that can parse and modify that file without knowing the exact format. Even if we could write such a script, there's no safe and secure way to modify files in user's home directories on package installation. The added complexity is I'm not sure hardware acceleration is broken for _all_ users or if it is broken only for a subset of Nvidia chipsets and driver versions.

[bowser (bwbernard-wong1)]

Why would you break vdpau and cripple your graphic card drastically just because of Youtube?? This has to be the most insane suggestion I hear. :)

 You don't need flash for Youtube! Here are a few alternatives (the bug affects only Youtube)

flashvideoreplacer, a Firfox addon

 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashvideoreplacer/

literna magica , a script that play videos without flash on many websites including Youtube

http://linterna-magica.nongnu.org/

smplayer (latest from ppa has youtube player)

All use mplayer as backend (if you install gecko-mediaplayer and since you have Nvida card you get hardware acceleration with vdpau.

So it would be nice if adobe fix the problem, It is no big deal even if it doesn't.

[bowser (bwbernard-wong1)]

@ Linards Ticmanis

"If Ubuntu can't ship a fix, then ship a workaround, for heaven's sake. If flashplayer is unmaintained, it's time to throw it out and go with one of the clones, even if they're not perfect. There *will* be bad security holes discovered even in 11.2 at some point in the not too far future, you can bet on that."

I would rather not because the 'clones' (lightspark and gnash if that is what you mean) doesn't work almost 100% of the time. It is going to give Ubuntu a really bad reputation if it is shipped with these. Like I said, you don't need flash or any of its 'clones' for Youtube ( and the clones don't even work 99.99% of the time, check them out yourself) , and you can still use flash for everything else where it is needed. With the 'clones' you have near zero access to all flash contents, peroid (except for the demos they put out, of course)

[Ron Johnson (ron-l-johnson)]

Precise 12.04
GeForce 210
nvidia-current 295.40-0ubuntu1
Flash 11.2.202.233ubuntu2
libvdpau1 0.4.1-3ubuntu1

Having /etc/adobe/mms.cfg with these lines solves the problem on my system:
  EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
  OverrideGPUValidation=true

[Oliver Etchebarne (drmad)]

Same problem with 11.10 and 12.04. Also, video shows overlayed over black portions in other virtual screens in XFCE, and it's really annoying.

Workaround from http://askubuntu.com/questions/117127/flash-video-appears-blue repairs the bad tint, but makes Flash player crash often.

[emptythevoid (emptythevoid)]

Also occurring for me with the 295.40 driver. I cannot choose *any* settings in flash to disable hardware acceleration either. I have to deactivate the nvidia driver and fall back on the free driver. Affecting both Chrome and Firefox. It is *not* a problem in Firefox if I uninstall the flash plugin completely, and then go to Youtube. I think it falls back to using HTML5 or some other codec, and it plays normally. Can't do that in Chrome, afaik. Using Ubuntu 12.04.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

I have started a community wiki on AskUbuntu to sum up the solutions, weed out misconceptions and prevent repeating ourselves from repeating.

Please improve it and vote it up: http://askubuntu.com/a/131040/19674

Oliver, emptythevoid: see the link above. Tell if there's anything unclear.

[Linards Ticmanis (ticmanis)]

Probably you guessed so, but I want to confirm that the bug is still there after the update of flashplayer to 11.2.202.235 that just happened.

[Nuno Sucena Almeida (slug-debian)]

Linards, just tried and have the bug remains. Tried with and without mms.cfg file, with frequent crashes when enabled.

[Daniel Mario Vega (dv5a)]

Workaround:

cd /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/
sudo perl -pi.bak -e 's/libvdpau/lixvdpau/g' libflashplayer.so

[Stephen Warren (srwarren)]

The following libvdpau patch detects Flash and implements some workarounds:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/vdpau/2012-May/000022.html

I'm not entirely sure if it's appropriate to add this to libvdpau, but it certainly does solve the issues on my machine...

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

String replace on binary file? That's sick but it works indeed, thanks! Basically it prevents Flash from finding the libdvpau in the first place.

Also thank you Stephen for a proper workaround on libdvpau level. I still wonder – Flash uses VDPAU only for presentation, does it have any performance benefits at all?

[Szabó Péter (quiller)]

Aaaand and update arrived today, but still no success in repairing the most trivial and yet irritating bug in Ubuntu history. This is just R.I.D.I.C.U.L.O.U.S.
Is it so hard to swap two color channels? Come ooon ... Canonical doesn't want to fall back to the working version, because of some security hole, that effects ... 2 or maybe 5 (?) people somewhere? Meanwhile this bug effects thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Beta testing doesn't make sense if Precise could make it to final, including this bug. It's a shame ...

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

Szabó: Indeed, it's quite embarrassing in my opinion. It definitely should not be a problem swapping two color channels.

Maybe we should start reporting bugs on the Chromium bug tracker instead, since new versions of Flash will only be shipped to Linux via Google Chrome from now on, as far as I understand. Google should be keen to enable hardware acceleration in general in their browser.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Shipping software with known vulnerabilities is even more ridiculous. Not to mention that Flash is not shipped with Ubuntu, it's available either through partners repository as a restricted extra or through community supported universe. If you want to use older version of Flash, feel free to do so, just don't blame package maintainers for doing the right thing. Blame Adobe instead: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3164063

I am quite happy about the recent workarounds and I think that Stephen's patch has chance of making it into the actual package (or at least there could be a PPA for the patched libvdpau). Unless, of course, Adobe fixes the bug.

Victor, Chrome Dev builds already ship with bundled PPAPI Flash Player which is very different to the current NPAPI Flash Player and probably doesn't have this bug. I doubt that Google will support 11.2 NPAPI version of Flash Player.

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

Jan: Ah, I see! I can't wait until they push it to the Stable channel in that case. Hopefully hardware-accelerated rendering and decoding won't be as prone to crashing as it is today (which is *EXTREMELY* prone, for me).

Either way, I just can't wait until HTML5 video gets hardware acceleration across the board and I won't have to deal with Flash at all. :P But That's off-topic. :-) That's for the info, anyways.

[Maarten Lankhorst (mlankhorst)]

I saw the patch on mailing list and I just want to see it is an awful workaround that will also make it impossible for flash to be fixed in future versions.

It's a lot safer to just add VDPAU_DRIVER=null to environment, which would make the driver only try to load a non-existing driver, disabling vdpau until they fixed the bugs. Adding a workaround in vdpau that's THAT ugly shouldn't ever become a real solution, since then adobe can never fix flash.

[Alex (d-f0rce)]

Stephen Warren's patch works great for me. Everybody who does no longer want to wait, can easily compile a custom package. Just copy the patch from his post and paste it into a file "vdpau.patch". Then patch and recompile the Ubuntu package:

$ sudo -s
$ mkdir build
$ apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev
$ apt-get source libvdpau1
$ apt-get build-dep libvdpau1
$ cd libvdpau-0.4.1/
$ patch -p1 < /path/to/vdpau.patch
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
$ cp src/vdpau_wrapper.cfg /etc/
$ dpkg -i ../libvdpau1_0.4.1-3ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Enjoy your videos.

Be careful when copying the patch from his post. The patch should start with the line "diff --git a/src/Makefile.am b/src/Makefile.am" and end with the line "+disable_flash_pq_bg_color=1".

When patching the source, the output should look like:
---
patching file src/Makefile.am
Hunk #2 succeeded at 28 (offset 1 line).
patching file src/vdpau_wrapper.c
Hunk #1 succeeded at 222 (offset 12 lines).
Hunk #2 succeeded at 389 (offset 12 lines).
Hunk #3 succeeded at 399 (offset 12 lines).
patching file src/vdpau_wrapper.cfg
---

Be aware that your custom package will be overwritten with the next update of the original package. So if the next update does not yet contain this patch, you have to do the procedure again.

[Alex (d-f0rce)]

Sorry for the noise, I forget one step in my last post:

It should loo like:

$ sudo -s
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
.....

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

I have tested PepperFlash in Chrome Dev build (unstable). It doesn't have this bug – guessing from the CPU usage it seems it really uses hardware decoding by default. Before jumping in, note that it has still many unrelated flaws, e.g. fullscreen doesn't work and it can sometimes speed up video playback. It's a development version after all, don't be surprised if it deletes your data and eats your lunch.

Maarten, thanks for pointing that out. What I like about this patch is that it pinpoints libflashplayer and can be easily turned off using configuration file. I think it's PPA-worthy; patched libvdpau1 can be provided as an easy workaround for affected users. Nonetheless it's still a (hopefully temporary) workaround.
VDPAU_DRIVER env variable is safer and cleaner, but I am afraid also not so easily deployable. It means a modification of browsers' launch scripts (or creating wrappers), possibly messing with file diversion to keep changes across browsers' updates. Unless there's some way to deliver this variable specifically to Flash Player's binary; something like a wrapper library?

Alex, thanks for the HOWTO. You can also pin the libvdpau1 package to prevent updates:
$ echo libvdpau1 hold | sudo dpkg --set-selections

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PinningHowto

[Maarten Lankhorst (mlankhorst)]

Either way, it is less ugly than adding that hack to libvdpau1, which breaks in a mysterious way when flash corrects its bugs. The only other alternative that's less invasive be to do the sed s/libvdpau/libxdpau/, said above, which would work but I'm not a lawyer so not sure if that's allowed in the license or not.

Hopefully adobe will release a patch shortly since it affects all linux users with a nvidia card that use the blob still.

[Alex (d-f0rce)]

@Jan Vlnas
Thanks for the pinning hint but I did not include it in my post, so people would still get the updates in case there are some security issues with libvdpau. After all the custom package is only supposed to be a temporary solution and recompiling the package only takes a few minutes.

@Maarten Lankhorst
I really don't see your point. The libvdpau-hack can easily be disabled by changing /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg. This can be done by the maintainer of the flashplugin-package once Adobe releases a fix. As soon as the issue is fixed, the patch can also be removed from libvdpau.

In my opinion it is much more important to get this issue fixed NOW, than waiting until Adobe gets their act together and fixes this bug. Adobe did not even acknowledge that they would fix this bug, so basically we might have to wait forever.

[Stephen Warren (srwarren)]

The whole point of the libvdpau patch is that it is easily reversible, and integrates trivially with the Ubuntu packaging process.

To reverse it, just change the configuration file.

To integrate with the packaging process, put the config file in the Flash package. That way, if a new Flash version is released that fixes the problem, the config file can be atomically edited to disable the workaround in libvdpau, and everything will just continue to work without users noticing.

All the other workarounds have various disadvantages:

a) Some/all simply disable VDPAU usage at all, which results in increased CPU usage, and in some cases disable VDPAU usage in all applications, not just Flash.

b) They edit files that are owned by packages other than Flash, and so it's impossible to actually package the fixes and atomically remove those fixes at the same time as a Flash update.

c) They probably aren't going to be packaged at all, thus requiring users to take complex steps to solve the problem, instead of Ubuntu performing trivial packaging steps to solve it for everyone without side-effects.

Note that Adobe has known about this bug for a long time. If they haven't fixed it yet, I seriously doubt they ever will.

[Jochen Fahrner (jofa)]

Stephen Warren wrote:

"Note that Adobe has known about this bug for a long time. If they haven't fixed it yet, I seriously doubt they ever will."

IMHO we should not implement dirty workarounds for some broken proprietary software. As a software engineer I always prefer clean solutions. If Adobe is not able to make working software, we should better think about ways to avoid using that broken software, instead of crippling our software with dirty workarounds.

I'm wondering how Apple iPads work with Youtube. They don't have flash, but can play all Youtube videos without restrictions. Why not go the Apple-way?

[Alex (d-f0rce)]

Jochen Fahrner wrote:
---
IMHO we should not implement dirty workarounds for some broken proprietary software. As a software engineer I always prefer clean solutions. If Adobe is not able to make working software, we should better think about ways to avoid using that broken software, instead of crippling our software with dirty workarounds.

I'm wondering how Apple iPads work with Youtube. They don't have flash, but can play all Youtube videos without restrictions. Why not go the Apple-way?
---

AFAIK, the iPad just uses the Youtube API to get access to the videos, so this is not an option.

In my opinion Ubuntu should take the pragmatic approach. Ubuntu wants to be the "Linux for the masses" and they should act accordingly. Youtube is one of the most popular internet services and watching Youtube videos without hardware acceleration just sucks, especially when you are using a notebook.

The "clean code" solution is certainly the silver bullet, but considering the number of people affected by this bug I'm all for the pragmatic approach here.

[Ashik (a-iqubal)]

Compiled libvdpau1_0.4.1-3ubuntu1_amd64.deb for Ubuntu 12.04 as per Alex's instructions using Stephen Warren's patch. Works great for me. Attaching the compiled binary for convenience.

Don't forget to create a file named /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg with the following contents:
enable_flash_uv_swap=1
disable_flash_pq_bg_color=1

A huge thanks to Alex and Stepeh Warren.

[Peter Wolf (onti)]

Can anyone create a temporary ppa with the patched libvdpau?

[Antonio Navarro (anavarrog)]

I fixed the problem in an Ubuntu 12.04 creating the mms.cfg file (/etc/adobe/mms.cfg) containing:

OverrideGPUValidation=true
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

and using latest 64bits flash plugin at: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/pdc/11.2.202.233/install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz

Hope it helps.

[Maxim Tikhonov (tikhonov)]

>Can anyone create a temporary ppa with the patched libvdpau?

Here you go (built for oneiric and precise):
https://launchpad.net/~tikhonov/+archive/misc/+packages

I am using (and therefore tested) oneiric 64 bit, but it should work on precise as well.

P.S. Because I used precise source package, the new version in oneiric repositories will not override my version. It should work fine for precise.

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Thank you Maxim, I also confirm it works with Oneiric. I've added your PPA to the workarounds: http://askubuntu.com/a/131040/19674

Antonio, this is a known workaround which causes frequent crashes of Flash Player for many people (see the link above). Have you found Flash Player to be unstable too, or is it okay?

[Montblanc (montblanc)]

Thanks, Maxim! You preceded me. :)

[Maxim Tikhonov (tikhonov)]

NP.

I can also confirm that /etc/adobe/mms.cfg workaround makes flash player very unstable (especially noticeable when skipping video on YouTube).

[Jason Fletcher (botanist)]

Maxim's fix works well for me :) Thankyou!!

I am on Precise.

[darthanubis (darthanubis)]

I have not patched on added any PPA and Youtube in Chromium on Precise for me is back to normal.

[Y. Leretaille (yleretaille)]

Still the same Problem with 11.2.202.235 @Firefox+Nvidia. This has to be fixed!

[drink (martin-espinoza)]

I still have the problem, crashes with mms.cfg mods, package with the patch actually fixes the problem without causing plugin to crash.

[shawnlandden (shawnlandden)]

I managed to reproduce this with the free radeon driver, by installing mesa vdpau acceleration from here https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/graphics-drivers package: libg3dvl-mesa

[Stephen Warren (srwarren)]

I don't think that last bug edit is valid; the bug is in Flash's use of the VDPAU API, and hence it is related to libvdpau acceleration not video acceleration.

[pt123 (pt123)]

the fix in Maxim Tikhonov PPA worked on 12.04 32 bit

Strangely on my 64bit newer comp flash videos were not affected.
Both computers are using nvidia 210 cards, but the 32bit is an AMD 4850 cpu while the newer computer is an Intel i5 2500K cpu

[coldReactive (coldreactive)]

@pt123, where is this PPA?

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

> Don't forget to create a file named /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg with the following contents:

That could be added to the deb package too. Just a thought. :)

I think it's very important that Ubuntu implement a fix or workaround
for this bug so that YouTube will work out-of-the-box. Otherwise,
regardless of who's ultimately to blame, it will be a hindrance to
Ubuntu's acceptance, AKA Bug #1.

As an aside, even when the Flash plugin isn't displaying the wrong
colors, its performance is poor. It seems like the choices are to use
hardware decoding so it plays smoothly, but suffer crashes, or use
software playback so it doesn't crash, but suffer stuttering video.

One handy workaround I discovered the other day is to use something
like this to play the videos in an external player, like VLC, while
letting the Flash plugin continue to do the downloading:

$ vlc "$(stat -c %N /proc/*/fd/* 2>&1|awk -F[\`\'] '/lash/{print$2}' |
tail -n1)"

Using this, you can skip ahead from within the Flash plugin to the
point where you want to start watching the video, then run that
command, and VLC will start playing from that point while Flash
continues the download.

[Jochen Fahrner (jofa)]

Adam Porter wrote:

"I think it's very important that Ubuntu implement a fix or workaround
for this bug so that YouTube will work out-of-the-box. Otherwise,
regardless of who's ultimately to blame, it will be a hindrance to
Ubuntu's acceptance"

IMHO Ubuntu should implement a solution which works without flash, like Apple does on iPads. Flash is proprietary, ugly and totally broken. Why should this be assisted by a free os?

We are all happy to be independent from Microsoft. Why should we establish dependencies to Adobe???

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

That's out of the scope of the out-of-the-box defaults. Flash is
ugly, yes, but it's not practical for Ubuntu to provide a replacement
that's suitable for all web sites that use Flash video. And it's
probably not wise to provide a solution for a specific site, like
YouTube. Maintaining such workarounds just isn't practical,
especially for a LTS. Besides, remember that iOS has YouTube-specific
features. You're talking about apples and oranges.

Since there is now a proven workaround for the bug, I think Ubuntu
should consider packaging it and releasing it, as Mr. Tikhonov has.

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Jochen Fahrner
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Adam Porter wrote:
>
> "I think it's very important that Ubuntu implement a fix or workaround
> for this bug so that YouTube will work out-of-the-box. Otherwise,
> regardless of who's ultimately to blame, it will be a hindrance to
> Ubuntu's acceptance"
>
> IMHO Ubuntu should implement a solution which works without flash, like
> Apple does on iPads. Flash is proprietary, ugly and totally broken. Why
> should this be assisted by a free os?
>
> We are all happy to be independent from Microsoft. Why should we
> establish dependencies to Adobe???
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/967091
>
> Title:
>  Wrong tint in flash when it uses video acceleration
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/libvdpau/+bug/967091/+subscriptions

[Aloysius (aloysius-w)]

Any chance srwarren's patch will make upstream?

[hdante (hdante)]

One month and a half with this bug and mantainers haven't downgraded the flash version, while the problem is being fixed

[Nick B. (futurepilot)]

That would be a very irresponsible move given how often Flash has security
issues. It would be putting hundreds of thousands of systems at risk.

On Saturday, May 19, 2012 02:54:51 PM hdante wrote:
> One month and a half with this bug and mantainers haven't downgraded the
> flash version, while the problem is being fixed

[László Monda (mondalaci)]

Mad props for Maxim! His PPA that he referenced in #122 worked for me perfectly.

[Linards Ticmanis (ticmanis)]

Once upon a time, there were four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. But Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Then Somebody got angry about it, because it was Everybody's job. But since Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, and Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it, it ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody and Nobody did the job that Anybody could have done in the first place. Right about this time, a fifth person visited. This person's name was Former Microsoft User. He looked around, saw what was happening, and never came back.

[superlex (e-lex)]

Hi.
I'm using Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 on Firefox 12, without /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and with Hardware Acceleration enabled. If I watch a video on Youtube the people are blue, but if I watch the same video on Facebook (e.g. sharing it) the people aren't blue. So, is the problem Youtube site and not Youtube videos (note: it works also at 1080p)?

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

superlex: Hardware acceleration is probably not enabled for embedded videos.

[superlex (e-lex)]

@Victor
Ok, it can be because of CPU usage.
I checked it by clicking on Settings and it was apparently enabled.
Thanks.

Regards

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

superlex: It's related to Stage Video which is used only by YouTube and few other sites, not by Facebook; embedded videos have no effects on this. Take a look at bug's explanation and known workarounds at http://askubuntu.com/a/131040/19674

(BTW, it's a community wiki, I don't get any karma for upvotes, so please don't take it as a shameless self-promotion)

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

By the way, the official Adobe representative (Zhe Wang) has responded:
"Can not reproduce on my Ubuntu" – https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3164063

I don't think he gets it.

[superlex (e-lex)]

Ok Jan, thanks a lot.
With libvdpau patched I solved the problem also in openSUSE.
If it could help you, my Nvidia card is 8400m GT and the driver is 295.40.

Regards.

[askuhn (askuhn)]

Zhe Wang: "Can not reproduce on my Ubuntu"
I don't even know how to react to this...simply unbelievable! This bug was introduced by Adobe over two months ago...

I also want to mention that the patched libvdpau from tikhonov's PPA has fixed the issue for me and I have noticed no problems with other apps that depend on libvdpau, such as xbmc. I'm not aware of the legal or technical intricacies that could result, but I feel that Cannonical should ship some kind fix for this, even if its temporary in nature, to avoid the damage to its reputation caused by not supporting a popular website like Youtube properly by default.

Ubuntu 12.04, driver 295.49, Nvidia GTS 250

Thanks!

[Montblanc (montblanc)]

Well, it seems he tried to reproduce it in the end... but it's not happening on his Quadro 2000.

My friend has a GT430, and after we both upgraded to Precise he was shocked to see that I was displaying blue faces while he was not. I'm putting my 2 cents in, but I think we can finally state that this issue is happening on a specific range of nVidia cards. The ideal solution would be for Adobe to collect as much data as possibile about the affected cards and provide an ad hoc solution.

Also, it makes sense when you think it's related to Stage Video: I was displaying blue faces on Vimeo too.

Let's make some pressure on Adobe https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3164063

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Interesting. Maybe the bug is related to the different VDPAU feature sets: http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/295.53/README/supportedchips.html
Quadro 2000 and your friend's GT 430 is feature set C, I am affected with GeForce GTS 250 (feature set A) and others seems to be affected with other feature set A GeForce desktop GPUs. On Adobe's bugtracker, there are users reporting the same bug with feature set B (and B1) GPUs. But there's a report by Adrian on GT 240M (feature set C) which breaks this theory; maybe we could link the bug to some particular GPU feature.

For the feature sets overview see http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/295.53/README/vdpausupport.html#vdpau-implementation-limits-decoder
There seems to be, however, no difference in terms of H.264 support. Maybe there's some particular, additional feature which allows Flash Player to use full video acceleration, therefore preventing this bug to show up.

[Alistair Buxton (a-j-buxton)]

My card: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GT215 [GeForce GT 240] [10de:0ca3] (rev a2)

This is feature set C according to the link. I have the bug.

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

I have a GeForce GTX 580 (feature set C). I have the bug.

[Trucoto (trucoto)]

Mine: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G96 [GeForce 9400 GT] (rev a1)
I have the bug too.

[Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod)]

GeForce GTX 560 Ti (feature set C), I am affected.

[askuhn (askuhn)]

My card is affected, GeForce GTS 250 (VDPAU feature set A).

[strazer (strazer)]

I'm affected, according to "lspci" I have:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G96 [GeForce 9500 GT] (rev a1)

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Okay, the theory about unaffected feature set C isn't so solid.

Montblanc: Could you please confirm that your friend with GT 430 has libvdpau1 package (from standard distribution) installed?

Searchings through strings from Flash Player's binary, I can't find any explicit VDP extension which could trigger or prevent the behaviour (but maybe I am doing it wrong – extensions are identified as constants, aren't they?).
At this point, I think it would be best to find out why some GPUs are not affected – is FP using full hardware acceleration (without crashing), no hardware acceleration, or is just sending chroma components in the right order?

[felixcorrales (felixcorrales-yahoo)]

This card is affected

*nVidia Video Card:* EVGA GeForce GTX460 SE 1 GB GDDR5 PCI-Express 2.0
Graphics Card 01G-P3-1366-TR

*>lspci*
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0e23 (rev a1)

El 26/05/2012 09:17, Jan Vlnas escribió:
> Okay, the theory about unaffected feature set C isn't so solid.
>
> Montblanc: Could you please confirm that your friend with GT 430 has
> libvdpau1 package (from standard distribution) installed?
>
> Searchings through strings from Flash Player's binary, I can't find any explicit VDP extension which could trigger or prevent the behaviour (but maybe I am doing it wrong – extensions are identified as constants, aren't they?).
> At this point, I think it would be best to find out why some GPUs are not affected – is FP using full hardware acceleration (without crashing), no hardware acceleration, or is just sending chroma components in the right order?
>

[oh (oystein-homelien)]

I am affected on several machines, with these cards (from lspci -nn):

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation GT200b [GeForce GTX 275] [10de:05e6] (rev a1)

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation G84 [GeForce 8400 GS] [10de:0404] (rev a1)

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 310] [10de:0a63] (rev a2)

All exhibit the "blue face"/swapped color planes problem when using youtube.

[Anders Häggström (hagge)]

My card is also affected and adding "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode = 1" to /etc/adobe/mms.cfg (and restart Firefox) helps for my setup without any obvious bugs/artefacts added.

# lspci -nn
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation G92 [GeForce 9800 GTX] [10de:0612] (rev a2)

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Anders: You have no stability issues with Flash Player? What CPU are you using (does it have multiple cores and/or hyper-threading)? I am asking because there are too many reports of EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode causing instability, that I doubt it is actually related to a particular GPU.
However, trace log by swiftgeek – http://pastebin.com/tJrXXqFk – could point to a race condition in Flash Player, which could be emphasised with multi-core CPUs.

Also, if you are using recent Google Chrome beta or unstable, always check what version of Flash Player is active (chrome://plugins). Pepper (PPAPI) version of the plugin was recently added to beta Chrome; PPAPI Flash is using full hardware decoding so it doesn't show this bug. It still has other issues, though.

[Anders Häggström (hagge)]

Jan: No, I have not experienced any obvious stability issues when I activated "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode".

My CPU is a quad-core Intel Q6700 @ 2.66GHz, with hyper-threading diabled.

I am only using Firefox that comes bundled with my 32bit Ubuntu-installation and upgraded as usual (currently Ubuntu 11.10 with Firefox 12.0 and Linux-kernel 3.0.0-20-generic-pae)

You have more information about my hardware/setup in my initial/duplicate bugreport, Bug #972314.

If I can help you by running any tests or if you want any any specific dump/logfiles, just tell me what/how to do it.

[Austin Halpin (haus)]

I had experienced stability issues after activating EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode

Adding the below line to /etc/adobe/mms.cfg has fixed the stability issues, however.

VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1

[Edmanuel Torres (eetorres)]

I solved this problem in Oneric following the excellent answer in this post:

http://askubuntu.com/a/131040/67722

[askuhn (askuhn)]

VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1 from comment #163 did *not* fix the stability issues on my GTS 250. Flash still crashed every minute or two. The patched libvdpau from the PPA is still the only proper fix I have been able to find for my hardware.

It doesn't look like any progress is being made on adobe's bugtracker either....

[Jan Vlnas (jnv)]

Thank you Anders, now I can rule out the race condition on multicore CPUs too; one last thing which comes to my mind is OS architecture – I am running 64-bit Ubuntu and I've experienced instability with EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode as many others. But given the most popular answer at Ask Ubuntu, maybe this solution works for more people.
It doesn't even make any sense to me (but we are talking about binary blob here, y'know; anything is possible with closed source).

So, does any of you have stability issues with EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode on 32-bit system?
Do you run 64-bit OS and have NO stability issues with EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode?

Austin: Are you sure about putting VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1 into mms.cfg? It's supposed to be an environment variable – unless there's an undocumented (?) feature for config file to push env. vars into Flash Player.

[Trucoto (trucoto)]

> So, does any of you have stability issues with EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode on 32-bit system?

I do.

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

Jan: I also have stability issues on 32-bit Ubuntu.

[Chadwick-ferguson (chadwick-ferguson)]

GTX 260 is affected.

[Grzegorz G. (grzesiek1e5)]

I disabled HW acceleration on my Precise and everything is OK. But comment #164 gives valuable information and you should follow this guide instead of just disabling HW acceleration.

[zpon (zpon-dk)]

The fix:
OverrideGPUValidation=true
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

Works for me sometimes, like on youtube, but engadget does still have messed up colors, e.g. http://www.viddler.com/v/8c410031?secret=103278737

[Shompol (shompol)]

Youtube workaround:

At http://www.youtube.com/html5/ click on Join HTML5 trial.

All youtube videos back to normal! The idea is that Flash is going away either way...

[Carnalbeast (carnalbeast)]

...using the html5 is even worst on my laptop. I have installed the nvidia driver. This sucks a lot really

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

I'm experiencing this as well. Disabling hardware accel in Flash seems to fix it.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation G84 [GeForce 8600 GT] [10de:0402] (rev a1)

model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+

Linux guyute 3.2.0-29-generic-pae #46-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 27 17:25:43 UTC 2012 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

nvidia-current:
  Installed: 295.40-0ubuntu1.1
  Candidate: 295.40-0ubuntu1.1
  Version table:
 *** 295.40-0ubuntu1.1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/restricted i386 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-security/restricted i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     295.40-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/restricted i386 Packages

libvdpau1:
  Installed: 0.4.1-3ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.4.1-3ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.4.1-3ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[LCJr (lwlonchaneyjr)]

Affecting me as well since last Flash update.

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise
X.org nvidia-current 295.40-0ubuntu1.1 drivers
GeForce GT430 manufactured by ASUS. ASUS model# ENGT430

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

Do we not have to worry, now that they have released livdpau 0.5?
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2012-September/002066.html

This is "invalid" in libvdpau but they still took it upon themselves to workaround this bug. Props.

[Maxim Tikhonov (tikhonov)]

From description it seems that they applied those fixes. I have not tested it yet. It should override version from my PPA (at least for precise).

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

This is fixed in 0.4.1-6ubuntu1 (released in quantal). Stephen Warren's patch was backported to libvdpau-0.4.1-6 by the Debian team.

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

I'd like to get the existing bugfix accepted as an SRU. Hope I get the SRU process more or less right.

While simply using the Quantal revision's changes in Precise would work perfectly well, I also created an update for the Precise version that includes only patches relevant for this bug. See the linked bzr branch and debdiff.

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Here's the debdiff that includes only the changes relevant for this bug.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

Hi Sebastian,

It probably doesn't matter for the Debian build system, but Stephen's version of the change breaks distcheck. I'd suggest using the upstream version: git format-patch -1 ca9e637c61e80145f0625a590c91429db67d0a40

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Hi Aaron,

Sorry, the SRU process is fairly new to me, but could you explain how to reproduce your problems with distcheck?

The debdiff that I uploaded just applies the patches that are already in use in Quantal to Precise. Basically this amounts to Stephen's upstream patch that you just referenced plus some minor packaging modifications:

 - debian/libvdpau1.symbol
 - debian/changelog
 - debian/rules

Again, I'm rather new to the whole process, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know.

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Aaron,

I just checked both the bzr branch linked above and the debdiff and can't reproduce any problems with either the Debian build system or a manual "./configure && make distcheck".

apt-get source libvdpau && patch -p0 < libvdpau_0.4.1-3ubuntu2.debdiff
and
bzr branch lp:~sometimesfood/ubuntu/precise/libvdpau/libvdpau.fix-967091

both work fine for me on a pristine Precise machine.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

Strange. The line in question is the one I mentioned in my reply to Stephen's original mail: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/vdpau/2012-September/000023.html

>> +
>> +libvdpausysconfdir=$(sysconfdir)
>> +libvdpausysconf_DATA = vdpau_wrapper.cfg
>
> This breaks distcheck:
>
> make[3]: *** No rule to make target `vdpau_wrapper.cfg', needed by `all-am'. Stop.
>
> I think this needs to be dist_libvdpausysconf_DATA.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't be seeing that in the Debian package since your debdiff adds the incorrect line rather than the fixed version in the upstream repository:

+@@ -27,3 +28,6 @@ libvdpauincludedir = $(includedir)/vdpau
+ libvdpauinclude_HEADERS = \
+ $(top_srcdir)/include/vdpau/vdpau.h \
+ $(top_srcdir)/include/vdpau/vdpau_x11.h
++
++libvdpausysconfdir=$(sysconfdir)
++libvdpausysconf_DATA = vdpau_wrapper.cfg

In any case, if it works for you and no one is actually expecting to use dist / distcheck from the Ubuntu package, then the difference is moot.

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

You were right, of course. I should have run "quilt push -a" before checking the distcheck results.

> In any case, if it works for you and no one is actually expecting to use dist / distcheck from the Ubuntu package, then the difference is moot.

Still I'd prefer to have a proper patch for this, I'll change my branch and the debdiff according to your suggestions tomorrow.

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Ok, just updated my bzr branch and the debdiff.

Aaron, could you have a look at it? I tried to keep changes to the bare minimum.

[Linards Ticmanis (ticmanis)]

Just found what is probably an (admittedly rather unimportant) typo in your debdiff: "a has table of VdpDevice". I assume that it's supposed to be "a hash table", no?

[Teo (teo1978)]

EVERYTHING that plays video with hardware acceleration has the colors messed up (even playing video files from disk on any player), not just flash. Been so since Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10.

Isn't this the same bug as #862831 ?
What does "fix released" mean? I still see the bug. (not in flash, 'cause I've disabled hw acceleration ages ago)

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Matteo,

No, LP: #862831 is definitely a different problem. Video playback using VDPAU works well in general for me and others on a lot of different machines, the tint bug only affects Flash videos and is fixed in Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal).

"Fix released" just means that a fix for this bug has been released in a newer version of the software.

See https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/Statuses for reference.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

On 10/23/2012 02:11 PM, Sebastian Boehm wrote:
> Ok, just updated my bzr branch and the debdiff.
>
> Aaron, could you have a look at it? I tried to keep changes to the bare
> minimum.

Looks okay to me.

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[Hans Deragon (deragon)]

Any chances to see the fix backported to 12.04 LTS? Many users that suffer from this bug do not want to have to upgrade to a non LTS. And I would hate the idea to have to wait until 14.04 to get this bug fixed.

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Hans,

the fix posted above is intended as a backport for 12.04, but the update process for stable releases is somewhat more involved than for development releases. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates for reference.

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

ACK on the merge request. I've uploaded a slightly modified version of it to precise-proposed for processing by the SRU team.

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

@Marc Deslauriers the precise version hasn't been approved from SRU team [1]

do you know the reason?

[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+queue?queue_state=1&queue_text=libvdpau
---
Ubuntu Bug Squad volunteer triager
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

[Tobin Davis (gruemaster)]

I just heard about this bug, thought it was an old monitor I had, but wasn't.

Now here's the rub. I have an x86 system that started showing this issue when I upgraded to Precise from Lucid (32bit only for old reasons - will reimage when I get a chance to backup 500G worth of development stuff). My system is a Core2Quad with nVidia 9600GT, and I have dual monitors setup using nVidia's Separate X Screens configuration. On my main monitor, I get this issue. On the other monitor, I don't. Video accelleration is active on both.

I tried installing libvdpau1_0.4.1-6ubuntu1_i386.deb, but it doesn't appear to have changed anything for me. Will reboot tomorrow and see if that helps.

[Tobin Davis (gruemaster)]

Nevermind. Restarted firefox and it works now. Still, quite odd that it worked on display=:0.1 but not display=:0.0.

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

Hello Aloysius, or anyone else affected,

Accepted libvdpau into precise-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libvdpau/0.4.1-3ubuntu1.1 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please change the bug tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not, change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

There's an apparmor multimedia abstraction change needed if /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg is installed as Firefox tries to read it. This is already present in quantal and raring.

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

Hello Aloysius, or anyone else affected,

Accepted apparmor into precise-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/2.7.102-0ubuntu3.5 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please change the bug tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not, change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Verified that the new apparmor package doesn't warn on /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg when accessing flash in Firefox.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package apparmor - 2.7.102-0ubuntu3.5

---------------
apparmor (2.7.102-0ubuntu3.5) precise-proposed; urgency=low

  * Allow reading of /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg in multimedia abstraction
    (LP: #967091)
    - add debian/patches/0020-vdpau_wrapper.patch
    - update debian/patches/series
 -- Micah Gersten <email address hidden> Thu, 29 Nov 2012 19:50:01 -0600

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

libvdpau-0.4.1-3ubuntu1.1 works great for me on all tested machines.

However, since I am the one who submitted the original merge request it would probably be better if somenone else could confirm this independently and change the tag to verification-done.

[MC Reezy (deezy4reezy)]

12.4 can not install an up date.

[John Schroeder (jschroed)]

MC Reezy, did you apply one of the workarounds? You may need to remove libvdpau1 and reinstall the Ubuntu version. I followed what pst007x (turone) wrote on 2012-04-02. He provided the link to: http://askubuntu.com/questions/117127/flash-video-appears-blue. The fix at the top involves adding a repository "ppa:tikhonov/misc" to use a special patched version of libvdpau1. To revert back to the Ubuntu libvdpau1, I disabled the repository and then followed the steps to enable proposed updates. Here's what I did:

Open Update Manager. Click on "Settings", then click on the "Other Software" tab.
Uncheck (or remove) the tikhonov repository.
Remove libvdpau1 at the command line with "sudo apt-get remove libvdpau1".
Check that flash videos (e.g. YouTube) are "blue" again.
Open Update Manager. Click on "Settings", then click on the "Updates" tab.
Check the checkbox next to "Pre-released updates (precise-proposed)". Close Software Sources.
At Update Manager, click on "Check".
There should be about 59 or so updates that come up. If you just want libvdpau1, unselect all the updates by clicking the box next to proposed, then look for libvdpau1 in the list and check it.
Click install updates. Once the update(s) is installed, you can go back to software sources and deselect proposed updates.
Check that flash videos (e.g. YouTube) are fixed.

Of course, if you applied a different fix, you will have to follow different steps to undo what you did.

[chocolateboy (chocolateboy)]

@jschroed: thanks for the instructions.

I can confirm that libvdpau-0.4.1-3ubuntu1.1 fixes the problem for me on Ubuntu 12.04 with Flash 11.2 r202.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The verification of this Stable Release Update has completed successfully and the package has now been released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regresssions.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package libvdpau - 0.4.1-3ubuntu1.1

---------------
libvdpau (0.4.1-3ubuntu1.1) precise-proposed; urgency=low

  [ Sebastian Boehm ]
  * Apply Stephen Warren's patch for blue tint in Adobe Flash videos
    (LP: #967091). (Applied to Debian version libvdpau-0.4.1-5.1 by
    Maurizio Avogadro.)

  [ Marc Deslauriers ]
  * debian/libvdpau1.install: also ship /etc/vdpau_wrapper.cfg
 -- Marc Deslauriers <email address hidden> Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:10:33 -0500

[Matthias Niess (mniess)]

I've just installed libvdpau 0.4.1-6ubuntu1 in Ubuntu 12.10 and have the blue tinted video.

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

@Mathhias: please file a new bug, you most certainly have a different issue.

[Tommy_CZ (t-kijas)]

I am experiencing this too.... I use latest Ubuntu 12.04.1 64bit and NVIDIA 310.14 drivers, all youtube videos have wrong colors (blue tinted).

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Tommy_CZ: Which version of libvdpau1 are you using?

[Michał Zając (quintasan)]

Running Kubuntu 12.10 and same things happens here, looks like the bug somehow got reintroduced

Linux demonbane 3.5.0-19-generic #30-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 13 17:48:01 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF114 [GeForce GTX 560] (rev a1)
libvdpau1 version is 0.4.1-6ubuntu1
nvidia-experimental-310 version is 310.14-0ubuntu1 (running experimental since stable have worse performance on my card)

The fix mentioned in comment #9 works and I can't say I had any problems with flash after creating /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and adding "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1" and "OverrideGPUValidation=true" there

[Sebastian Boehm (sometimesfood)]

Michał,

libvdpau1 has not been updated on Quantal and I can't say I have noticed a regression. All my NVidia machines were affected with 12.04 and don't have any problems with either the recently updated libvdpau1 or the one in 12.10.

sebastian@foucault ~ % uname -a
Linux foucault 3.5.0-19-generic #30-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 13 17:48:01 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
sebastian@foucault ~ % lspci | grep NVIDIA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF114 [GeForce GTX 560 Ti] (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GF114 HDMI Audio Controller (rev a1)
sebastian@foucault ~ % aptitude show libvdpau1 | grep Version
Version: 0.4.1-6ubuntu1
sebastian@foucault ~ % aptitude show nvidia-current-updates | grep Version
Version: 304.51-0ubuntu1
sebastian@foucault ~ % aptitude show flashplugin-installer | grep Version
Version: 11.2.202.258ubuntu0.12.10.1

[evuraan (evuraan)]

Glad that a fix has been provided for 12.04.

Will this fix be extended to 10.04 (lucid) as well? I've a bunch of machines running 10.04, and has this problem.

As for specifics,

root@lmo:/usr/lib/vdpau# aptitude show libvdpau1 | grep Version
 Version: 0.3-2build1

root@lmo:/usr/lib/vdpau# ls -ltr *vdpau*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 65640 2012-11-06 18:06 libvdpau_trace.so.304.64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1867256 2012-11-06 18:06 libvdpau_nvidia.so.304.64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2012-11-06 18:06 libvdpau_trace.so.1 -> libvdpau_trace.so.304.64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 2012-11-06 18:06 libvdpau_nvidia.so.1 -> libvdpau_nvidia.so.304.64

thanks!

[Eugene Romanenko (eros2)]

I installed nvidia-experimental-310 package and got a blue tint. Then I reinstalled libvdpau package and blue ting is gone.

Looks like nvidia driver package includes it's own unfixed libvdpau.

[Yaroslav (yarosla)]

This blue tint / blue overlay was driving me crazy. Tried all offered solutions - none helped. Finally I found out that it is my new Dell U3014 monitor that is causing this trouble. It has very nice feature called "Smart Video Enhance". Turned it off.

[Alexis Wilke (alexis-m2osw)]

I had that problem on one of my computers where I installed the CUDA development system. The CUDA installs its own libraries and the libvdpau_nvidia.so library was not getting used!

I used the following command to remove the "offensive" vdpau library:

   sudo rm /usr/lib/libvdpau.so /usr/lib/libvdpau.so.1 /usr/lib/libvdpau.so.304.54 /usr/lib/libvdpau_trace.so

Then I restarted my browser and it worked like a charm.

You should have another library named:

   /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so

If not, then you probably will have problems...

FYI, I had CUDA installed with:

cuda_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu11.10-1.run

When running 12.04 and it worked fine. When I upgraded to 13.04 I decided to remove CUDA for the time being and still had that color problem.

I found the solution (a mention of that library) from this Adobe bug report:

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3109467