Why are the embedded videos I try to watch all FUBAR?
November 18, 2011 6:59 PM

Why do many embedded videos look bright green and all pixel-y on my laptop?

This has been happening sporadically for me on a range of sites, everything from blogs to YouTube to news sites to Vimeo... yet other videos on those sites seem to display just fine, as does Hulu, Netflix etc.. Usually the audio plays clearly, the images are just blurred with huge pixels and typically a bright green hue. I'm on a PC with Windows 7.

So far Google only seems to yield tips on how to host videos so this doesn't happen, not how to view them when you're having the problem. Any ideas?
posted by tenzingy to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
You probably have an issue with hardware-accelerated decoding of Flash content. Temporarily disable the "Enable hardware acceleration" option in the Settings... available by right-clicking on any Flash object and restart your browser. If you can now watch videos without this issue, that's the problem. Re-enable hardware acceleration by checking the box and restarting your browser. Then, update your browser(s), Flash plugin(s), and video card drivers to the most recent revision.

If this doesn't solve things, you may: have a hardware problem with your video card (least likely); watch a lot of poorly edited videos that at some point were encoded with B-frames and later re-encoded by someone who doesn't understand video compression (more likely); be using a driver from a manufacture that hasn't yet shipped a fix for Flash hardware acceleration (very likely at that point, and wholly inexcusable).
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:21 PM on November 18, 2011


Not sure what kind of PC you're on, but check recalls on your video card/laptop/desktop as well. Inspector.Gadget pretty well covered every other possibility.
posted by uncannyslacks at 7:30 PM on November 18, 2011


This has happened to me in all browsers since the latest Flash update. On Windows 7 here too.
posted by cmgonzalez at 9:29 PM on November 18, 2011


Oh, and I can usually help the situation by clicking the round runtime indicator on YouTube once or twice in Firefox and Chrome. Doesn't seem to work in IE.
posted by cmgonzalez at 9:30 PM on November 18, 2011


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