784645 - Flash does not work on FF 14.0.1 with HWA on Nvidia 550M 8.17.12..6830

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Build ID: 20120713134347

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to play flash video e.g. on http://www.focus.de/videos/
OS = Win 7 up to date. FF = 14.0.1 up to date. Flash plug-in = 11.4.402.265
Current laptop with lots of power. McAfee antivirus, version 11.0.687
Yes, all other plug-ins and extensions disabled and FF restarted.


Actual results:

The video does not play, does not even appear. The waitbar circle is moving but the video never shows up.


Expected results:

Play video.

Here are my 2 little observations/contributions which might help to solve the issue:

1) When restarting "with add-ons disabled" (safe mode) THEN Flash works as intended!
(despite all extensions already disabled before!)

2) When double-clicking on the video, it appears and plays in full screen (in new window) without problems! As soon as returning with ESC to normal view in FF,  the wait-circle is back, no video.

Comment 1

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

PS: Audio plays while the video does never appear.

Comment 2

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

PPS: Adblock does not seem to be the problem. Disabled.

Comment 3

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

PPPS: I really STRONGLY disagree with the 'not-my-problem' attempt of this Mozilla site:
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/flash-113-doesnt-load-video-firefox
Obviously google can cooperate with Adobe to make the current flash player running on chrome (same URLS and videos as given above DO work normally). Flash is too important for users to say: Not our problem!!!!!

Comment 4

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

PPPPS: The fact that in direfox' safe mode the video plays as intended shows that flash per se is able to play the video correctly at the correct location. So this MUST be a firefox bug which makes the http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/flash-113-doesnt-load-video-firefox appear quite arrogant.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Please disable the hardware acceleration in options/advanced/general followed by a FF restart.

Please post the graphic section of about:support (enter as URL) if disabling the hwa helps.

Please limit your comments to technical details. bugzilla is a tool for our developers to manage their work and is not a discussion or support Forum, thanks.

Comment 6

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

Attachment: about:support - graphics section

1) disabling the HWA resolved the issue
2) attached please find the requested about:support section
3) sorry about my non-technical discussions

Comment 7

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

So, if the HWA internally is treated as an add-on, which gets disabeld when FF is restarted in safe mode, why not simply make it a visible add-on for the user, which the user then would be able to disable if it does not work? The alternative, to disable it automatically when bad conditions on the computer are detected, might be less transparent as then the HWA might be disabled while the user thinks it is ON? Or grey out/not show the HWA option on bad computers?

Comment 8

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Could you please update your graphic card driver and report back if that makes it work with hwa enabled ?
Your case is a little bit more complicated due to Optimus (dual intel+nvidia cards).
I have no experience if there is a single package with both drivers or not.

As you can see in your screenshot we already block some cards and drivers. In your case we blocked the Webgl part of the acceleration but it seems that this is not enough.
see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers#On_Windows
 
The safemode is a "tool" that should help to troubleshoot issues
It disable all extensions, hwa and the javascript JIT and it loads the default window/toolbar positions settings.

It worked perfectly in this case as I already knew what it could be.

Comment 9

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

1) Sorry, I don't know how to update the driver. Please advise.
2) Just confirming that the HWA is the cause: When disabling the HWA while on the video page, the video starts playing instantly.

Comment 10

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

Back to the user's perspective of the bug. Is it possible for FF to test if flash (or the HWA) works on a loaded site? Rather than micromanaging black/white lists, IMHO it would be better to simply disable the HWA in this case. Am I totally wrong?

Comment 11

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

More precise info: It's the Nvidia graphics card which causes the problem, not the Intel graphics card.

A right-click on my desktop provides me with a NVIDIA Control Panel software. When I reported the bug, I had set it to always use the NVIDIA graphics card for Firefox. When I toggle it to use the "integrated graphics" (Intel HD graphics) then flash works in FF.

Comment 12

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You can find updated drivers for you nvidia550M here http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
-> http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-301.42-whql-driver.html
But you may want to check your notebook manufacturer page first.

Bugs in video drovers are random and you can't test for it.
Is that right that flash doesn't work only on this single page and e.g. it works on Youtube ?

Comment 13

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

Attachment: Driver information after update which resolves flash problem

Comment 14

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

I updated the driver for the NVIDIA graphics. Now, Flash works properly in FF 14.0.1 with HWA enabled when using the NVIDIA card.
--> If you add my old NVIDIA driver version (see attachment 1 [details] [diff] [review]) to the black list of drivers, a few more users will get rid of the HWA and subsequent flash problem?

Comment 15

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

To answer your question: Flash does not work on a couple of pages but works on youtube.

Comment 16

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

1) I am sorry that I won't be able to provide more details about the bug because I just updated the driver, so I can't reproduce. I don't have the time to downgrade again. Thanks to the developers for helping me to resolve the problem on my machine. I still hope that flash problems go away for all FF users soon.

2) OK, I got it, this is not a discussion page, but I am curious: Why did flash work in chrome when it did not work in FF? I had set chrome also to be executed with the NVIDIA card. Does chrome use a different method for HWA which does not collide with bug in the old driver?

Comment 17

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

PS: I made sure that FF again actually runs with the NVIDIA card by using the NVIDIA Control Panel GPU activity monitor which says that FF runs under the NVIDIA graphics. Just to confirm that the new NVIDIA driver actually fixes the problem.

Comment 18

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

As a layman I don't get it. My attachment 1 [details] [diff] [review] shows that NO window was hardware accelerated?! Nevertheless, the enabled HWA, in combination with an older NVIDIA driver, caused a problem for the flash plug-in? Or did FF try to HWA the page but didn't detect it properly because of 2 graphics/optimus?

Comment 19

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

OOps, what's going on here? I did not want to add the hyperlink to attachment 1 [details] [diff] [review] but was talking about the first attachemnt above! Sorry.

Comment 20

[florian.neubauer.neuroscience]

Additional information: The bug is NOT related to flash's protected mode. I switched flash protected mode off using the flag ProtectedMode=0 in the mms.cfg file but the problem persisted.

(I actually DID revert to the old NVIDIA driver because optimus did not work properly anymore after driver update. The desktop had no anti-aliasing anymore and looked really bad.)

Comment 21

[Andrei Purice]

Marking this as Resolved > Incomplete since the last real activity on this issue was 9 years ago and Flash is not supported anymore.