Blue Skin Tones In Flash Video – 436 days old

[ZemaTalon]

I did a bunch of updates the other day in Mint, I didn't notice Flash being one of them, but ever since then the colors have been off in Flash videos, most noticeable is the blue skin tones. I found this thread discussing the issue. Anyone else run into this?

EDIT: I just checked and I'm using Flash 11.2 r202 in both Chromium and FF (problem occurs in both).

[Bad Haircut]

Not seen it crop up at the Chakra forums but will keep an eye out.

[ZemaTalon]

It seems to be related to an update to libvdpau, but not the fault of libvdpau, but rather of Flash. And from what I've been reading, Adobe refuses to acknowledge the problem. I found this Ubuntu forum thread talking about it. A few workarounds were suggested, there's one produced by a guy from Nvidia that patches libvdpau:

For people running into either the "leaking overlay" or the "blue people" problems, I wrote a patch to libvdpau_trace.so designed to suppress them.

Please clone libvdpau from git and apply this:

http://plagman.net/stuff/0001-vdpau_...h-quirks.patch

This will cause the resulting trace library to change the VDPAU behavior of any clients that have tracing enabled, so make sure you only enable tracing for the web browser that loads the Flash plugin (eg. for Firefox in Ubuntu, you'd add an "export VDPAU_TRACE=1" line to /usr/lib/firefox-n.n/firefox.sh). Trying to use tracing on any other VDAU client after this has been installed won't work right as it suppresses all the tracing messages and swaps color channels for some operations. Please make sure to restore a vanilla build of libvdpau_trace.so on your system before filing a VDPAU bug against something else.

from nvnews forums
And another workaround is to just disable hardware acceleration for Flash videos. Then someone mentioned the Flash-aid extension for Firefox that worked for them. It was mentioned here & here.

[Alakazam]

I had this also, turned off HW acceleration and the colors went back to normal, I've got a bunch of updates to get, perhaps they will cure things but from what reading I did a few days ago, the finger seems to be pointing to Adobe.

[ZemaTalon]

I agree Zammy. I just messed around with the Flash-aid extension, it installed the 64 bit Flash beta, but it too has the flaw, so it did nothing for this problem. Then I thought I'd attempt the patch. The header for the patch says

From 079bd445d1fed5e12772a28142c916b1510fe848 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Pierre-Loup A. Griffais <git@plagman.net>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:41:37 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] vdpau_trace: WAR Flash quirks

This stubs out all the tracing routines but two; one to ignore calls to
set_background_color to ignore Flash setting the colorkey to black. The other
wrapped function is put_bits_y_cb_cr, to swap the U and V planes as Flash sends
them to us in the wrong order.

and the patch method is something like

1) Clone current libvdpau git HEAD, apply patch to it, autoreconf -f && configure && make && make install.
2) Head on to /usr/lib, remove /usr/lib/libvdpau_trace.so symlink pointing to /usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_trace.so.{nVIDIA_DRIVER_VER} and create a new symlink named /usr/lib/libvdpau_trace.so pointing to newly installed /usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_trace.so.1.0.0

and after contemplating that for a minute, I decided to just disable hardware acceleration too

[Grogan]

So go back to an older version of flash player that didn't cause a problem with Nvidia's VDPAU acceleration. (Nvidia Linux is the only driver that uses that... I don't see much incentive for supporting it, even though the FRONT END is open source. Everyone else has to implement the X11 backend themselves. I would just stick to more traditional APIs for hardware acceleration if I were the developer. i.e. OpenGL/DirectX). Adobe is dropping support for the Linux X11 flash plugin anyway, and soon the only flash player for Linux will be a Windows blob for Google Chrome's wrappers.

Don't think that you have to stick with the flash player in your distro's repository. Just remove your distro's flashplayer package, get a good libflashplayer.so and drop it in /home/yourname/.mozilla/plugins and browsers that use it will look there. (Firefox, Seamonkey, Chromium, Konqueror etc.) That is the only way I ever install the flash player... and it's the version of my choosing, from Adobe.

This is a version "Shockwave Flash 11.1 r102" that I got in February that works marvelously for me. This is a 64 bit libflashplayer.so (Note: I'm using ATI, so I'm just guessing that this version is pre-problem)

MD5SUM:
0bdb111acaecbba2f1a124a068669fae libflashplayer.so

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/users...shplayer.so.gz

That's gzipped, not a .tar.gz. That means you just gunzip it in place. (there will be only one file... libflashplayer.so and the libflashplayer.so.gz will be gone). The md5sum is for the libflashplayer.so, not the .gz file. I keep that in:

/home/grogan/.mozilla/plugins

Create the plugins directory if it's not there.

[ZemaTalon]

Thanks Gro that seems to have taken care of it

[Alakazam]

Dang, followed your advice Gro but still have the blue tones, HW acceleration off again. I just updated the kernel to 3.3.1 and the latest nvidia drivers but still no go.

[Grogan]

It's got nothing to do with the kernel, and Nvidia probably haven't acknowledged it as their problem let alone have a fix ready. They probably would try to get adobe to fix it (probably rightly so).

Did you remember to first remove your existing flashplayer? (uninstall distro package) If not, it's installed to a system location and would probably be the one that loads.

about:plugins in a mozilla based browser would tell you the version that's loading.

[Alakazam]

Yes Gro, I un-installed through the package manager but it's still showing v. 11.2 r202 in the about:plugins. I'll have to revisit this tomorrow some time, I've got an early day tomorrow, thanks.

[Grogan]

That's what I suspected. There is somewhere another libflashplayer.so that your browser is picking up. It may be that more than one package installed a flash player and removing one didn't remove the file.

[Alakazam]

I'll come back to this once I get my X install working properly again, seems that with the new 295.40 nvidia drivers I installed, nvclock no longer works and my temps on the card are reasonable at around 62 C but I don't like that I can't turn the fan up a bit, it's running really slow, around 400 rpm.