Feeling Blue?

Problem: Color issue with Flash videos using nVidia driver.
Solution: None.
Possible Temporary Fix: Switch to noveau drivers or disable hardware acceleration.

If you, like me, are running Shockwave Flash version 11.2 r202 along with a nVidia card and the proprietary drivers in Linux you might have noticed a lot of blue skinned people posting in Youtube videos.

No, it's not a new race. For some reason the colors get screwed up and the resulting video has a lot more blue in it than intended.

After reading about the issue over at these forums I found out that I, like others, had a wrapper installed for running browser plugins not intended for my architecture. As my browser and plugins are all 64bit this "nspluginwrapper" could be safely removed. However this had nothing whatsoever to do with the problem at hand. Still it was a nice discovery.

Back to the issue at hand, it seems like it can be reproduced under the following conditions:

• Running Fedora 16 x86_64 (64bit).
• Using the propretiary nVidia drivers.
• Using Shockwave Flash version 11.2 r202 (Adobe Flash Plugin).

Testamonials from above linked website say that disabling hardware acceleration or switching to the noveau (open source alternative) driver "solves" the issue.

If that's not an option then here you have another solution submitted by StephenH over at fedoraforum.org who in turn refers to this source.
As root, enter the following into a terminal.

$ mkdir /etc/adobe

$  su -c 'echo EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1> /etc/adobe/mms.cfg; echo OverrideGPUValidation=true >> /etc/adobe/mms.cfg'

This will create a directory called "adobe" within the /etc directory. The second command will create a file called mms.cfg with the lines:
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=true

However this solution was reported by another member as causing problems such as instability and very long load times for flash applets.

One user suggests removing the line "OverrideGPUValidation=true" from the file, thus having mms.cfg containing only:
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

I'm going to give the last suggestion an attempt and post the results...


...and it didn't do anything at all.

I guess I'll just stick with watching Avatars over at Youtube on a daily basis for now as I don't feel like switching drivers to noveau and there's no way I'm disabling hardware acceleration on my Intel Atom machine (without the ION chip I won't be watching much of anything).


Update Monday, May 14 2012
New nVidia drivers today, however the problem remains.