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I have version 27.0 of the Flash plugin installed on Firefox 56.0 / Ubuntu 16.04.3. It was working fine until today, but suddenly no sites with Flash (not even Adobe - Flash Player ) will display it — any Flash videos just appear as a blank space. However, Is Flash installed? - WhatIsMyBrowser.com still says "Flash 27.0.0 is installed in this browser".
Does anyone know of a way to troubleshoot this?
Thanks!
And suddenly today, Flash works again. No idea what broke it yesterday or what fixed it today.
I'll include the output of `lshw` just in case, but I don't know if it's worth pursuing when I can't reproduce the issue any more.
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You can try disabling hardware acceleration in Flash Player. If it doesn't help, please turn it back on.
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/video-playback-issues.html
Similarly, you should be able to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox. Again, if it doesn't help, turn it back on.
If that doesn't work, you might try another browser (I suspect that this is a Firefox thing) like Google Chrome, just to validate that assumption.
If it *is* Firefox specific, then you might pick up a copy of the Firefox ESR. It will be an older version of Firefox, but patched with security fixes. If the problem goes away, you know that it was introduced by a recent Firefox version. In that instance, you might check the Nightly version of Firefox, to see if there's already a fix in the pipeline.
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Thanks jeromiec83223024. Here are my results:
So the mystery isn't 100% solved, but using an ESR of Firefox is a pretty good solution for now at least.
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Exactly the same situation, Chrome working, Firefox not.
Somewhere else they suggested to switch to Firefox-esr but of course thay is a workaround.
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Great, thanks. This fits with my intuition.
I'll spin up an Ubuntu machine this afternoon and see if I can reproduce it.
Thanks!
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I'm not able to reproduce this, although I *did* find and report a different Firefox bug.
I'm guessing there's a hardware specific aspect to this.
Can you give me the system specs? I need to go find a similar machine.
This should output them to a file called specs.txt. You can just copy and paste the contents here.
sudo lshw > specs.txt
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And suddenly today, Flash works again. No idea what broke it yesterday or what fixed it today.
I'll include the output of `lshw` just in case, but I don't know if it's worth pursuing when I can't reproduce the issue any more.
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Flash still does not work for me right now but I see a pending update of:
chromium-browser chromium-browser-l10n chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra cpp-5
firefox firefox-locale-en firefox-locale-it g++-5 gcc-5 gcc-5-base
gcc-5-base:i386 libasan2 libatomic1 libcc1-0 libcilkrts5 libgcc-5-dev
libgfortran3 libgomp1 libitm1 liblsan0 libmpx0 libquadmath0 libstdc++-5-dev
libstdc++6 libstdc++6:i386 libtsan0 libubsan0
So the Firefox update may fix it.......
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And it did, so case solved for me
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I probably should have led with "If you haven't already, completely power down the machine, then power it back on again". It looked like a corrupted video buffer. It's possible that an underlying driver or something was in a bad state. If you figure out how to reproduce it, definitely let us know.
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I had this same issue with Firefox 56.0, how I fixed it was in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0
WindowlessDisable=false
OverrideGPUValidation=true
After making these settings flash works in Firefox again.