Many of you may have been noticing issues with Flash lately where videos don't play on the first try—you just get a green screen. Technology weblog Digital Inspiration shows us how to fix this problem.
Generally, if you get a green screen on a Flash video (audio but no video), you can refresh the page and get it working again—but that's annoying, and you'll probably have to do it every time you restart your browser or your computer. While the root of the problem is likely hidden in your video drivers, a quick fix is to just disable hardware acceleration in Flash. You might experience a slight decrease in performance, but you'll actually get video working again without going to too much trouble.
To do this, just right-click on the video you're trying to play, go to Settings, and uncheck the "Enable Hardware Acceleration" box. From now on, your videos should start playing properly. It isn't the most ideal solution, but it's a good, quick, temporary fix. Note that I've only seen this happen in Windows, but the menu is also accessible from OS X and Linux.
Does your Flash Player Look Like a Green Screen? | Digital Inspiration
You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.