[Solved] Flash is... well... flashing...

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Just updated my world yesterday, and today, I have a flash player that does some weird things.

If I go to youtube (in firefox), and watch a video, it is usually okay for one video if I don't touch anything, then when I watch the next, the video will start flashing (strobing), although the sound is not affected. The other weird thing is that if I switch desktops (using KDE here) the strobing video will stay on the screen, even though there is no firefox (or anything else) on that desktop. Same thing happens when I have another window over the flash video or when I scroll firefox. Flash no longer works at all in Konqueror.

I have tried recompiling nspluginwrapper, and recompiling adobe-flash several times, and tried removing nspluginwrapper (which, of course, leaves me with no working flash at all).

Here is my info:

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Ookay... updated again today, and now have ff 3.6.15, and flash is completely broken. At both Youtube and CNN, I get prompted to install the plugin... grrr...
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The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

unmake the most recent flash and don't use nspluginwrapper.
I have flash installed as

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Well...

That got the plugin working again... but I have the flashing/strobing problem again....

So, I'm back to where I was when I originally posted...

CNN seems to work... Youtube flashes. Maybe it is something Youtube changed that Gentoo didn't anticipate? On my Debian Netbook, I do not have this problem.... but that is a 32 bit machine too, so it is hard to say...
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gerard27 · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 12:52 pm Post subject:

Plse check this post.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=6605675#6605675
Also the link to bugs.
I upgraded 2 days ago and FF told me to upgrade flash but I didn't.
Youtube works fine.
Gerard.
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rini17 · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 4:19 pm Post subject:

Same problem here. I tried to upgrade to flash 10.2.152.27_p201011173-r2 but X server started either to logout or to segfault after first video

I have ati fglrx driver, 64bit gentoo. Downgraded to 10.1.102.64, that works fine.

erdem · n00b Joined: 10 Mar 2011 Posts: 6

Hi.. I had also flash related problems in 64 bit. After switching to 32 bit i still had some problems related to flash.

So i edited my /etc/adobe/mms.cfg:

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Well...

I did an emerge -ev world last night... and mysteriously, this problem was fixed. I know that is like using a sledge hammer to drive a carpet tack, but flash wasn't really why I did it (something else happened unrelated to this issue since my last post)... it just happened to fix the problem -- unless this has just been a freak-show of coincidences and the issue was really with youtube and they fixed it... but I don't think so. My wife's PC still manifests this issue. I will try to do the same thing for her, and see if it helps. At least this should prove whether it is a bug or an inconsistency on my system.

So, I wish I had something useful to say here to anyone with this problem in the future, but I really don't -- except if at all possible, add buildpkg to your make.conf -- it will save you a LOT of time!

(I'll mark as solved if my wife's PC is fixed).
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davidm · Guru Joined: 26 Apr 2009 Posts: 557 Location: US

I don't want to hijack but I am also seeing some flash weirdness. I'm also having the issue where artifacts are staying stuck on the screen and bleeding through..

Previously I was having an issue with Firefox 3.6.16 and adobe-flash where it would always crash if I clicked on another video in Youtube when another was playing. Interestingly adding "EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1" has seemed to stop the crashing.

Another oddity. I noticed that initially there was no accelerated rendering occurring. However after clicking settings and unchecking (it was always checked previously) then checking "use hardware acceleration" mysteriously "show video info" started reporting that it was using accelerated rendering most of the time. Even for the same videos where it previously was reporting that software rendering was being used.

Here is a related bug report for the artifacts: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355191

Interestingly this last issue where the accelerated rendering wasn't being activated until changing the settings also occured just a few days ago when the machine used "Arch Linux" as well with the new adobe-flash. However, the artifact issue did not occur (I was also using a Firefox 4 beta then).

My Hardware:

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Dammit. The problem has resurfaced as mysteriously as it disappeared...

Still got the flashing and the artifacts. It is completely unwatchable...

I tried erdem's idea... but that didn't work either.

I have no clue where to turn now...
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The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Really random idea: could your firewall be interfering with flash? I had some issues with flash and they stopped when I altered my firewall.
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grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

No, no changes there... and It still works properly on my Debian netbook behind the same firewall...
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davidm · Guru Joined: 26 Apr 2009 Posts: 557 Location: US

I just wanted to mention after updating and recompiling some packages as well as using Firefox 4 Beta 13 from the Mozilla overlay all my crashing and artifact problems have seemingly disappeared. I doubt it is significant because I did not have Twinview or Xinerama enabled at the time of occurrence but I had a mix of packages compiled for +xinerama and -xinerama. Perhaps somehow the inconsistent states threw something off? I'm not aware of the details of the particular code in question so as to assess the probability of this but I suppose it might be a possibility with the way the various programs might interact with conflicting xinerama support.

eiennnoai · n00b Joined: 26 Mar 2011 Posts: 1

Sorry for the 12 days necro.

I was having the exact same problem as a (very)new gentoo user with firefox4 and adobe flash 10.2 (coming from debian, so I'm kind of lost for the moment lol) and tried quite a lot of things without much success, put xinerama to 0 along with some other tweaks with nvidia-settings as suggested by davidm just to be sure and everything worked like a charm !

I need to drop my thanks as you saved the day. I hope this will help other people too, though I don't have the knowledge to do a full checkup and explain why this fixed everything (I'm pretty sure I wasn't even using xinerama...).

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

This problem seems to have disappeared. I really think it was an issue with YouTube, that they resolved. My upgrade was timed perfectly with their change-over (by cooincidence). I don't have the problem anymore, and I haven't updated anything to do with flash...
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