The Fat Aussie Barstard Blue

Blue YouTube Videos!

I’m using the Linux distribution Fedora 16 on my primary home computer at the moment. I don’t particularly like the GNOME 3 interface, so I’ll probably change to Linux Mint with Cinnamon shortly, but I’m stuck with this rather stupidly designed mess in the mean time. In fact I was about to change today before I found a fix for a very weird problem, blue skinned people on YouTube videos!

That’s right, you heard it correctly, the people on YouTube videos were blue, just like this one of The Fat Aussie Barstard here.

The Fat Aussie Barstard Blue

The Fat Aussie Barstard Blue

At first I thought it was some kind of joke from The Fat Aussie Barstard, as he is a bit of a character on YouTube. However, I played another video on YouTube and sure enough that also had a person with blue skin!

When I was using my Macbook Air yesterday I received an update for the Adobe Flash Player, so I had also updated my Linux Fedora 16 PC to the latest version (Adobe Flash Player 11.2). This seemed to be the cause of the problem, as other videos played through VLC  or Media Player were fine.

After a bit of googling I found a solution that has worked for me. You need to turn off the “Enable hardware acceleration” option on the Adobe Flash Player Settings window.

To do this, right-click anywhere on the video and select “Settings” at the bottom of the menu. You should then see the following window appear on top of the video where you need to de-select the check box option.

Adobe Flash Settings

Adobe Flash Settings

Once you have done that just reload the page to get the video playing with normal skin tones!

The Fat Aussie Barstard Normal

The Fat Aussie Barstard Normal

I’m not sure who is to blame for this latest example of why Linux distributions are NOT ready for the desktop. With this problem all the other idiotic choices that have been made for GNOME 3 it seems that RedHat only wants people to use Linux on servers and tablets!

I tried to compare the CPU utilization of a 1080p YouTube video with the hardware acceleration on and off, but when I had hardware acceleration on the video playback went completely haywire!

At least there is a quick and easy way to get YouTube videos with a blue tint back to normal, but there should be no need to fix such a simple problem in the first place. Clearly there was not enough testing before this update was pushed out!

6 thoughts on “Blue YouTube Videos!

  1. NickG

    Surely you must know that this isn’t Fedora or Red Hat’s fault?

    The repositories you used to install the flash-plugin aren’t managed by Red Hat, or the Fedora team, and have 0 association with them. This is purely Adobe’s fault, and bugs can happen on any platform.

    Also, if you like Fedora but hate Gnome 3, why not try a different desktop spin? I recommend Xfce personally, but KDE and LXDE are also officially supported. Or you can run Mate (not officially supported) to get Gnome 2 back.

    PS
    As far as finger pointing goes, Adobe screwed up and now Flash sends the U/V planes in the wrong order when using vdpau.

    Reply
    1. louco73 Post author

      Yes, I know it’s not Fedora or Red Hat’s fault for this blue tint YouTube video problem. If you read my post I was not blaming anyone for this problem, as I was trying to be slightly diplomatic in case it was a combination of NVidia drivers/Flash problems. It does seem, as you suggest, that it is indeed Adobe’s fault.

      I do, however, blame Red Hat for the awful GNOME 3 as a desktop enivonment. I just installed Linux Mint into Oracle VM VirtualBox and played with a couple of desktop environments there. Cinnamon 1.4 looks pretty good and MATE would get the job done too, so I’m going to re-install this machine with Linux Mint and Cinnamon to get a productive desktop back. Before that I will do a post on how unproductive GNOME 3 is for a workstation!

      I’ve used Red Hat (and variants) since the days where you could buy it in a box, but have tried SUSE once and have a Debian based Network Router (Untangle). It’s sad that Fedora no longer meets my requirements, but that is both the beauty and horror of desktop Linux, there are plenty of choices!

      Reply
    1. louco73 Post author

      Dave, good to hear. I’m on Mint 12 now too and looking forward to upgrading to the next release. It’s soooo much better than Fedora! 🙂

      Reply

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