[SOLVED] Flash video problems with Firefox

[gotang]

I'm having some problems with flash videos on Firefox, but really don't even know where to start with debugging. Some flash videos will either give high frequency flickering (to the extent that the actual video playing behind is not actually visible), and when this happens, sometimes the audio plays perfectly, other times it mimics the visual effect with extremely distorted jerkiness. Other flash videos play absolutely perfectly - it is dependent on the website. Oddly though, all of the videos play absolutely perfectly in Chromium. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling flash-player-plugin and flash-player-plugin-kde, which has made no difference. I'm currently running Mageia 3 x86-64 and it's a Dell Latitude E4310 with Flash player version 11.2.202.310 installed.

Here are example videos, which are probably UK-only links (sorry!)
Example of a video that plays fine:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... Adventure/

Example of a problematic video (it plays with flickering visual, but audio is fine):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/24511959

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[doktor5000]

Yes, have noticed that too - Could be either related to a missing libvdpau update, or something in flash player is broken, you may want to take a look at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=166593 which describes the issue pretty well - and see the last comment there.
Basically i see that for most sites which use embedded youtube videos ... but switching to fullscreen usually fixes it, only flickers like hell in windowed mode.

If you want to test, I could upload my updated vdpau packages, do you use i586 or x86_64?

[gotang]

Thanks! I'll confess, this is a fair bit beyond my understanding - I thought that Intel graphics didn't support VDPAU (though I'll be the first to admit that I don't really have a clue about any of this). I'm not 100% sure that this is the same problem actually - I've never seen a problem with youtube, embedded or not, and the fact that it all plays happily in Chromium (and Opera, now that I've thought to test it) means that I assume that the problem lies either with Firefox or the Firefox plugin. But I'll happily give your vdpau packages a go if you think it might be the cause; I'm on an x86_64 system.

[doktor5000]

Ok, here you go:

lib64vdpau1-0.7-1.mga3.x86_64.rpm.txt

(7.78 KiB) Downloaded 209 times

You have to strip away the .txt extension from the filename, forum doesn't allow for .rpm files to be uploaded.

Restart Firefox after installation and let me know how it goes.

[pete910]

hehe, that fixed it, always thought it was a amd beta driver bug

[gotang]

No joy for me unfortunately. I think my problem is likely a different issue entirely. It does seem really strange that it only affects Firefox and not other browsers - they all use the same flash plugin, right?

[doktor5000]

Depends, Chrome brings his own plugin bundled with it IIRC.

[gotang]

Aaaah, it's always something really stupidly simple, isn't it? I checked Opera, and noticed that it was pointed at the same flash plugin as Firefox, so I reasoned that it had to be an issue with Firefox rather than flash. And once I'd realised that I had been looking in the wrong place, it was so quick - all it took was clearing out my ~/.mozilla/firefox/ folder. Must have been some remnant of some old configuration that was screwing things up (no idea what, but I'm happy enough not knowing!). Thanks for all of the help - I'm now feeling rather foolish, but also glad that it's fixed!

[doktor5000]

Thanks for all of the help - I'm now feeling rather foolish, but also glad that it's fixed!

You're welcome. And you're only a fool if you make yourself one. If your posts helps at least you or someone else to fix this or a similar issue, isn't that worth feeling a fool shortly?