Flash Player (VDPAU enabled) is crashing

I like an old Linux distributions. Now I’m using SLED 11 SP4.

Some time ago, I tried to upgrade Debian 5.0. I’ve upgrage Glibc from 2.7 to 2.12, then to 2.15 (for Steam). Also upgrade kernel, Qt, ntfs-3g, Firefox.

On Ubuntu 12.04.5, Firefox 38 + Flash Player + VDPAU aren’t crashing. I had used DEB-SRC for upgrade the kernel (3.16 from Debian Wheezy) and Glibc (2.15 from Ubuntu Precise) on my old Debian. Flash Player works with an old Glibc, and crash with the new Glibc.

I can capture a video, where Flash Player are not crashing with Glibc 2.7 and 2.12. And crashing with 2.15 (however Glibc version is same with Ubuntu). Also I can put there ISO image.

The Firefox version of flash (NPAPI plugin) with hardware decoding has been crashy since the very beginning. If you ever found a magic combination of libraries that worked, consider yourself lucky. As the NPAPI flash hasn’t been developed for years now, and will even stop getting security fixes end of next year, there’s nothing you can do really. Except one thing: uninstall NPAPI flash and instead install freshplayer-plugin and PepperFlash. This works much better.

PepperFlash doesn’t support hardware video acceleration :-(

I think freshplayer supports vdpau and va-api.

Nah, that was a case years ago, then there was a period when everything worked.

NPAPI Flash plugin accelerates on anything since Fermi on virtually any driver up to and including 355.11 - unfortunately 358.16 broke something with vsync and single load of Flash plugin makes VDPAU tear until reboot (actually Xorg restart is enough, same thing though).

So yeah, forget about Flash acceleration, but the reason is not Flash itself - it’s the recent Nvidia updates.

And please don’t blame Flash for not being updated (which isn’t nice but didn’t cause this problem!) Think about it: how can a tiny userspace program break your whole driver? However bad they use the API, there’s no excuse for introducing a DOS attack ;)

As xylef said, freshplayer-plugin does. Both VDPAU and VAAPI.

How can you be so sure flash isn’t at fault? It’s a closed blob that’s always been prone to bugs even when it was actively developed.

I just explained? However rusty or bad or even malicious the code is - there’s no excuse for the driver to break when an application uses it.

Think about it this way: if you write a post on this forum, and the post contains some XVI-century word that none of us ever heard, is it acceptable that the forum stops working until reboot? Or that my computer blows up when I open the thread? ;)

No you didn’t. It could still be the fault of flash, doing some weird thing that worked by chance years ago, but now causes the driver to enter a state that it can’t recover from (or maybe it can, you just haven’t found the magic incantation yet).

Flash has always been buggy, particularly with VDPAU. Remember the blue people thing? That’s only gone because Nvidia worked around it with a hack? If Adobe can’t even get the order of the U/V planes right, you really can’t trust them to get more sophisticated stuff right. And video presentation is very sophisticated, more so than you’d think, you can be sure of that.