No more blue videos on Youtube

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Quite recently many Ubuntu users using nVIDIA hardware as their primary graphics card, experienced an unhappy situtation watching blue color videos on Youtube. The problem is widely known, since Ubuntu is the top mainsteam Linux distribution and Youtube is one of the most visited websites today. In time, a temporary solution was found – disabling the hardware acceleration in Youtube videos, meaning more load for the processor. Searching in forums, you probably will find much more solutions, but they were all temporary fixes.

The problem

The first headache comes from Adobe. According their statements, the Flash video 11.2 version is their final product — no new version coming up. In contrast, Adobe will provide you only security support, releasing bugfixes from time to time – but no new version of flash video is going to be released. The second headache comes from nVIDIA and their linux driver. More specifically, the hardware acceleration part had problems when libvpau1 and VDPAU were enabled. The VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is an open source library (libvdpau) and API originally designed by Nvidia for its GeForce 8 series and later GPUs.

So far, Adobe and nVIDIA are failing to cooperate or even to provide an official solution to the Linux community. Yet, Linux community is capable of finding a solution by itself. Stephen Warren discovered that this problem is messing around with a library from nVIDIA library, so he edited the libvdpau and fixed the problem — without disabling hardware acceleration part. Currently, the “fixed” version of libvdpau is hosted on a third-party repository, meaning all you have to do is adding this extra repo into your sources file and then update your packages.

The solution

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tikhonov/misc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libvdpau1

Ok, now the repository is installed into your Ubuntu system and you have libvdpau1 fixed version installed. Please restart your browser and try Youtube. Does it work?

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