Accelerated playback on YouTube swaps red and blue color channels

[Victor Zamanian]

On YouTube, you can right-click the player and select "Show video info". An information box pops up and you can see if the video is being played back using hardware acceleration or software rendering. For me, it's usually played back using software rendering, but I just now installed the mplayer2 package, which depends on libvdpau1, and all of a sudden, I got hardware-accelerated playback. However, this swaps all videos' red and blue color channels. (Sky and water are red, and red things are blue, and people kind of look like smurfs, but green things remain green.)

Upon removing the libvdpau1 package, the videos go back to normal, with red and blue in their proper place.

I am using Google Chrome, which uses its own bundled version of the Flash plugin, but the problem also happens in Firefox which uses the Flash plugin installed on the system. My graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580. No overclocking or funny business there though, just a reference card.

The following is a list of versions of more or less relevant packages:

$ apt-cache policy google-chrome-stable flashplugin-installer libvdpau1 nvidia-current
nvidia-current:
  Installed: 295.33-0ubuntu1~oneiric~xup1
  Candidate: 295.33-0ubuntu1~oneiric~xup1
  Version table:
 *** 295.33-0ubuntu1~oneiric~xup1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu/ oneiric/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     280.13-0ubuntu6 0
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric/restricted i386 Packages
libvdpau1:
  Installed: 0.4.1-2ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.4.1-2ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.4.1-2ubuntu1 0
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
flashplugin-installer:
  Installed: 11.2.202.228ubuntu0.11.10.1
  Candidate: 11.2.202.228ubuntu0.11.10.1
  Version table:
 *** 11.2.202.228ubuntu0.11.10.1 0
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates/multiverse i386 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security/multiverse i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     11.0.1.152ubuntu1 0
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric/multiverse i386 Packages
google-chrome-stable:
  Installed: 18.0.1025.151-r130497
  Candidate: 18.0.1025.151-r130497
  Version table:
 *** 18.0.1025.151-r130497 0
        500 http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Kevin Turner (keturn)]

Probable duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/+bug/967091

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

Kevin: Indeed, they seem to have been experiencing the same thing.

Following instructions from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/+bug/967091/comments/9, everything works now, and I have both hardware-accelerated video playback *and* decoding as well, with correct colors:

$ cat /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=true

So I am confirming this is a duplicate, regarding the reported behavior in that bug.

[Owen Williams (ywwg)]

This workaround no longer works for me as of nvidia 295.40.

[Victor Zamanian (victorz)]

The workaround works for me on nvidia 295.40.

Although the flash player becomes very unstable as others have reported, and it crashes *very* often for me. Disabling hardware acceleration from inside the flash player is also a workaround, by right-clicking the flash player and selecting Settings -- if one wants to keep libvdpau1 for other purposes (like mplayer2/xbmc/etc), for example.