Disable hardware acceleration for Flash player in Linux

Question

The latest official version (and supposedly the last version for Linux) of Flash player has some interesting issues on Linux systems. The biggest issues which have summarily been confirmed on the Ubuntu forums are:

• YouTube videos have a red / blue color overlay
• Flash content shows through on other windows

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

The commonly accepted solution to this issue appears to be disabling hardware acceleration for Flash player. This is usually accomplished by right-clicking the Flash content, selecting Settings and then uncheck the Enable Hardware Acceleration option, but in the affected version of Flash player, it isn't possible to uncheck that particular option (clicking it does absolutely nothing). As such, the following two work-arounds exist for disabling hardware acceleration:

• Method 1: Create (or edit, if it already exists) the file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and add the following configuration parameter to it: EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0
• Method 2: Open a YouTube video and enable fullscreen mode. Then right-click, select Settings and uncheck the Enable Hardware Acceleration option. For some reason this only seems to work when Flash player is in fullscreen mode.

Method 2 fixed it for me.