Flash Video has wrong colors

[Rene Schickbauer]

After a recent "apt-get upgrade" (last one or two weeks in March 2012) Flashvideos on YouTube display in the wrong colors. Looks like red and blue get swapped. This is a bit annoying since every person now looks like a smurf or one of those "Avatar" creatures.

System is an Alienware Laptop with an NVidia graphics card.

This only seems to affect flash video, (HTML5 Videos on Youtube when available display the correct colors). Other players like VLC and mplayer are unaffected as well.

This bug can be reproduced in Chromium as well as in Firefox.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: flashplugin-installer 11.2.202.228ubuntu0.11.10.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-17.30-generic 3.0.22
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-17-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Mar 31 22:24:41 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release amd64 (20111012)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: flashplugin-nonfree
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Rene Schickbauer (rene-schickbauer)]

Screenshot of a typical false color video

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Phil Pemberton (philpem)]

I'm seeing this too. It's like setting the hue slider to +100 in smplayer.

So basically, Flash is messing up the hue setting when X video acceleration is enabled.

A nasty workaround is to right-click a flash video and select Settings. On the first tab, disable hardware acceleration. That'll get the videos to play with the right colours, but they might skip, stutter or Flash might hog the CPU a bit more :-/