A

Anonymous

Question

Adobe Flash Player playing video crashes the whole system

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
February 11, 2011
7 replies
3545 views

Hello,

I've started to experience this problem for maybe a month or so. The problem is: the whole system completely freezes; mouse is sometimes "alive" (I can move it) for a few seconds but then a reboot happens anyway (or I trigger it manually). At first I couldn't determine the source of the problem, but I'm convinced now that this comes from Flash Player, by the following evidences:

I started to notice that it happens very often when I try to watch some embedded video. It can be a player of YouTube, RuTube, Vkontakte (Russian services which offer videos too) - basically, anywhere where the flash object loads and plays some video. It doesn't happen exactly always, but quite often - for example, I tested it now especially for this topic, pressing "play" on an embedded video player on the page; 2 times it didn't freeze but the 3rd time it freezed the system.

Also I noticed it happen not only with video services, but, for example, flash banners which play some video - this can be very nasty as you can guess because I can't really "control" that, it happens not because I press play, but by itself. Overall, the freeze happens when the Flash Player loads / plays a video.

It happens in Chrome; in Firefox it sees to freeze the browser (or maybe the whole system, I'm not sure) for a fraction of a second, right before the video starts (on YouTube, for example). This one isn't disturbing much, but I believe it has the same roots as the Chrome issue. Also, sometimes the freeze happens not instantly, but after a few minutes after I watched the video, but usually instantly.

I've seen other users complain about suspiciously similar problem here as well, so I believe it's not an issue with my OS / video drivers / anything like that, but a bug in Flash Player. Anyway, my system specs: Windows XP SP3 with latest updates; Google Chrome 9.0.597.94 (also autoupdated), Adobe Flash is version 10.2.154.12.

BTW, it also does (it did so often in the past, but not so often now) sometimes start to eat a whole lot of CPU time, as seen in Task Manager, for example, so I have to kill it in Chrome.

Any recommendations / etc?

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Anonymous

Are you using an ATI/AMD video card of some kind? If so, I just went through the ringer trying to solve this and DID solve it!

First, I started getting blue screens of death, especially while playing Youtube videos. The screen would get choppy, and sometimes I would get an error about my ATI driver restarting, then the screen would turn green, then the computer would crash with a BSOD. I didn't pay attention to when this started happening but happen to be running an HP DV7-4071NR laptop with the ATI Radeon HD 5650. Based on what I found, it was likely after a Flash Player update.

Anyway, it seemed that the system was running hotter than normal and the fan was really loud so I assumed something was wrong with the heatsink compound or the heatsink was clogged. I first took the ENTIRE laptop apart, cleaned all heatsink fins, cleaned off all heatsink compound/goop, and then re-gooped, and re-assembled everything. The computer was running A LOT cooler and the fan was barely running. The stock compound was a silver/gray substance while I replaced it with Arctic Alumina. It also seemed to boot faster and be much more responsive and I assumed all problems were solved but nope. It was still crashing.

I then went and updated the ATI drivers with the latest Catalyst installer. No go here too.

I then uninstalled ALL graphics drivers and ALL Adobe Flash Players, which appeared to be up to date. I then reinstalled all the graphics drivers and made sure they were at the latest version and then did the same for Flash Player. Everything worked at this time but I do have one issue. When I re-ran the Windows Performance Index, it came back with a score of 4.4 for Graphics and 6.1 for Gaming graphics while it had come up with a score of 6.7 for both categories in the past. The current driver update wasn't provided by HP while the first driver install was. What is going on here?

It is too late and I need to get to bed as I have been kept up by this problem. I thought a GPU/motherboard problem was to blame and that I might be buying a new laptop. I will do some experiments with downgrading drivers tomorrow to see if that is why my performance dropped. At least I have a much cooler running and snappier system otherwise due to the disassembly and cleaning/re-gooping of the heatsinks and such.

Conor

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pall_zoltan

Participating Frequently

disable it from here chrome://plugins/ - dont forget to click + Details on the top right

Z.

A

Anonymous

Yes, I know where to disable it, but I don't want to do that. I need flash on many websites, on different occasions etc - but I want it to stop freezing my system, because it stops me from using sites like YouTube, etc properly.

A

Anonymous

Alright, so finally that I identified my problem (and also that other users experience it too) I decided to roll back to 10.1.102.64 which was stable. It was installed in my Firefox (the latest one was only in Chrome) and in Firefox I didn't have any problems. So, I followed the steps from here:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html

and here:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

The result was unexpected - Flash was uninstalled from Firefox, but Chrome kept its own version (I've heard that newest Flash is always "built into" Chrome, is that right?) So, Firefox suggested me to update to 10.2.152.26, and this one is stable. However, the one in Chrome (154) is not, and I don't even know how to roll it back to 152.

Anyway, since apparently I'm not the only one - will there be any comment from Adobe about this issue, or a patch or something? Or, at least, how do I roll back to 10.2.152 in Chrome?

A

Anonymous

BTW yes, I remembered - it started to happen VERY explicitly (and bug me out) right after Adobe Flash suggested me to update to a newer version. I didn't remember it at first (it's a minor thing systemwise), but yes, now I remember. Everything worked fine (maybe it did freeze sometimes, but VERY rarely and I'm not sure it was because of flash video back then) before, but the last few days, with newest version of Flash, this happens.

P

Pandronio

Participant

Hello

I am experiencing pretty much the same thing except that now, using FF (and also IE and Chrome) the whole computer freezes as soon as I go to the front page of youtube (as an example) - everything breaks it, including flash banners etc (not really surprising). It also froze any reboots unless I manage to run a cleaning program like CCleaner - it removes Flash and browser-related temp. files.

I am getting desperate. I have wasted all day trying to make things work. Everything seemed fine until I installed the very latest version of Flash Player 10.2.xxxx

Thanks for any help

Andrew

A

Anonymous

I don't know why my next post just got deleted, but here it is again:

It didn't help at all. The system still freezes as soon as video in Flash Player is played.

Does Adobe Flash interact somehow with FLV codec in the system, or it plays video stream by itself?

pwillener

Legend

Try disabling Hardware Acceleration (Flash Player Settings).

A

Anonymous

Didn't help AT ALL. The system still freezes as soon as video in Flash Player starts to play.

BTW, does Adobe Flash use FLV codec installed in the system when it plays a video, or does it play by his own means? I have sort of a not very fresh FLV codec (installed it in 2009, as far as I remember), but the problem appeared only in the last month or so.

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