Disable Adobe Flash Player hardware acceleration in the embed code or AS

Question

We run surf camera streams on our website, which are played via the latest version (5.4) of JWPlayer on our pages.

Recently we switched over to another streaming service, and H.264 streams, as we are planning on streaming out to iOS devices in the very near future, however this introduced a bug on the client side where users to not receive vision (they only see a black screen where the video is normally seen).

We have discovered that disabling the Hardware Acceleration (which was introduced in Flash Player 10.1+) fixes this issue, and given the spectrum of environments where this issues is happening I would wager that this is related to specific graphics cards, their drivers, and how they handle the vision decoding etc.

The documentation we have found relating to disabling Hardware Acceleration only indicate that this can be done via the wmode param, i.e. by setting it to wmode="opaque" or wmode="transparent" however this doesn't seem to work in all cases (for the most part the issue is no longer there) however we are still seeing 30% of our users getting this issue.

We can ask the users to disable hardware acceleration themselves, and we have provided details on how to do this, however to me that is only a temporary fix, and I was curious as to whether or not there was something more permanent we can put in until Adobe fix up this issue?

Answer 1

So, I found a solution to the issue - its kind of two part though.

Firstly: Setting wmode="opaque" or wmode="transparent" will disable hardware acceleration - unfortunately there was more involved in the issues we were experiencing, as detailed below.

Secondly: The issue we were continuing to experience was related to the type of stream we were sending out. Our streams were the kind you see from beaches or snowfields etc (aka snowcams, surfcams) - and of course, the sound of the beach or wind up in the mountains is pretty boring, so we don't send audio in the feed.

It turns out that this was the cause of the problem. The H.264 decoding was failing, mostly on Macs, but more or less on any 10.1 players if there was no audio data being sent. The solution for this was simple - enable the audio channel at 0dB (or whatever muted is) and bam the streams start running again.

This isn't an optimal solution, because it adds a 16k overhead to our stream which we would rather put towards higher quality vision. I have raised a ticket with Adobe, FP-6085 so hopefully this will be addressed in a future release. Or 'HTML5' streaming will become a reality across all browsers.

Answer 2

This is happening to us as well on our website.

We have been able to avoid the issue on machines that are under our control, but we have not been able to resolve this on our users machines.

This seems to happen on Mac/Chrome only.

Here are my box'es specs.

Chrome Version chrome://version

Google Chrome 20.0.1132.57 (Official Build 145807) OS Mac OS X WebKit 536.11 (@122148) JavaScript V8 3.10.8.20 Flash 11.3.300.265 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_4) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11 Command Line /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome -psn_0_5944747 --flag-switches-begin --disable-gpu-vsync --enable-sync-tabs --flag-switches-end

About Flash chrome://flash

Google Chrome 20.0.1132.57 ()

OS Mac OS X

Flash plugin 11.3.300.265 /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/Versions/20.0.1132.57/Google Chrome Framework.framework/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player Plugin for Chrome.plugin

Flash plugin 11.3.300.265 /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin (not used)

--- Crash data ---

Crash Reporting Enable crash reporting to see crash IDs

For more details https://support.google.com/chrome/?p=ui_usagestat

--- GPU information ---

--- GPU driver, more information ---

Vendor Id 0x1002

Device Id 0x6740

Driver vendor
Driver version 7.18.18

Driver date Pixel shader version 1.20

Vertex shader version 1.20

GL version 2.1

GL_VENDOR ATI Technologies Inc.

GL_RENDERER ATI Radeon HD 6770M OpenGL Engine

GL_VERSION 2.1 ATI-7.18.18

GL_EXTENSIONS GL_ARB_color_buffer_float GL_ARB_depth_buffer_float GL_ARB_depth_clamp GL_ARB_depth_texture GL_ARB_draw_buffers GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex GL_ARB_draw_instanced GL_ARB_fragment_program GL_ARB_fragment_program_shadow GL_ARB_fragment_shader GL_ARB_framebuffer_object GL_ARB_framebuffer_sRGB GL_ARB_half_float_pixel GL_ARB_half_float_vertex GL_ARB_imaging GL_ARB_instanced_arrays GL_ARB_multisample GL_ARB_multitexture GL_ARB_occlusion_query GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object GL_ARB_point_parameters GL_ARB_point_sprite GL_ARB_provoking_vertex GL_ARB_seamless_cube_map GL_ARB_shader_objects GL_ARB_shader_texture_lod GL_ARB_shading_language_100 GL_ARB_shadow GL_ARB_shadow_ambient GL_ARB_sync GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp GL_ARB_texture_compression GL_ARB_texture_compression_rgtc GL_ARB_texture_cube_map GL_ARB_texture_env_add GL_ARB_texture_env_combine GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3 GL_ARB_texture_float GL_ARB_texture_mirrored_repeat GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two GL_ARB_texture_rectangle GL_ARB_texture_rg GL_ARB_transpose_matrix GL_ARB_vertex_array_bgra GL_ARB_vertex_blend GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object GL_ARB_vertex_program GL_ARB_vertex_shader GL_ARB_window_pos GL_EXT_abgr GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_bindable_uniform GL_EXT_blend_color GL_EXT_blend_equation_separate GL_EXT_blend_func_separate GL_EXT_blend_minmax GL_EXT_blend_subtract GL_EXT_clip_volume_hint GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array GL_EXT_draw_buffers2 GL_EXT_draw_range_elements GL_EXT_fog_coord GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit GL_EXT_framebuffer_multisample GL_EXT_framebuffer_object GL_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB GL_EXT_geometry_shader4 GL_EXT_gpu_program_parameters GL_EXT_gpu_shader4 GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays GL_EXT_packed_depth_stencil GL_EXT_packed_float GL_EXT_provoking_vertex GL_EXT_rescale_normal GL_EXT_secondary_color GL_EXT_separate_specular_color GL_EXT_shadow_funcs GL_EXT_stencil_two_side GL_EXT_stencil_wrap GL_EXT_texture_array GL_EXT_texture_compression_dxt1 GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc GL_EXT_texture_env_add GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic GL_EXT_texture_integer GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias GL_EXT_texture_mirror_clamp GL_EXT_texture_rectangle GL_EXT_texture_shared_exponent GL_EXT_texture_sRGB GL_EXT_texture_sRGB_decode GL_EXT_timer_query GL_EXT_transform_feedback GL_EXT_vertex_array_bgra GL_APPLE_aux_depth_stencil GL_APPLE_client_storage GL_APPLE_element_array GL_APPLE_fence GL_APPLE_float_pixels GL_APPLE_flush_buffer_range GL_APPLE_flush_render GL_APPLE_object_purgeable GL_APPLE_packed_pixels GL_APPLE_pixel_buffer GL_APPLE_rgb_422 GL_APPLE_row_bytes GL_APPLE_specular_vector GL_APPLE_texture_range GL_APPLE_transform_hint GL_APPLE_vertex_array_object GL_APPLE_vertex_array_range GL_APPLE_vertex_point_size GL_APPLE_vertex_program_evaluators GL_APPLE_ycbcr_422 GL_ATI_blend_equation_separate GL_ATI_blend_weighted_minmax GL_ATI_separate_stencil GL_ATI_texture_compression_3dc GL_ATI_texture_env_combine3 GL_ATI_texture_float GL_ATI_texture_mirror_once GL_IBM_rasterpos_clip GL_NV_blend_square GL_NV_conditional_render GL_NV_depth_clamp GL_NV_fog_distance GL_NV_light_max_exponent GL_NV_texgen_reflection GL_SGI_color_matrix GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap GL_SGIS_texture_edge_clamp GL_SGIS_texture_lod