I have NVidia graphics card G98 [GeForce8400 GS] on openSuSE11.4 with driver. Everything looks fine except when I go to YouTube, all colors are distorted. People's faces are blue. See sample screenshot below:
http://www.users.on.net/~dwhb1/YouTube-color.png

You can see that colors of all other images on the page are normal. About 10% of some YouTube videos are normal. Has that got to do with quality of video or something wrong with my graphics card (which I doubt).

Can someone please help me or tell me why this is so? Thanks very much in advance

Does playback of other flash videos (on sites such as Vimeo) work properly and as expected?
Have you also tried playback of videos in a normal video player (such as Dragon, VLC, etc)?

Thanks for the response.
Vimeo and regular DVDs are all showing correct colors in both VLC, Kaffeine and browsers (Opera & Firefox). Videos on Kaffeine are sharper and color is noticably better. Colors on a small number of videos on YouTube are not distorted - eg people do not have blue faces. I am at a total loss.

My monitor is LG IPS231 (DFP-0 on GPU-0) 1920x1080. I have tried selecting different viewing modes on board the monitor (User, Movie, Text, Photo, sRGB) but it made no difference.
NVidia X Server Settings are as follows:
X Server Display Configuration - XScreen color depth 16.7 million colors (depth 24) selected. There is one option above which is 1.1 billion colors (depth 30) Experimental
X Server Video Settings - "Sync to V Blank" and adjusted Brightness -18/Contrast 0/ Hue -5/Saturation 0

Cheers

I suspect you may be seeing either a bug in Flash itself, or an interaction bug between the version of Flash you have, and the latest Youtube viewer. Would it be possible for you to try Chromium?

I do have the same problem with Adobe Flash player! Using the nvidia drivers, the red and blue channels are sometimes (!) swapped in youtube videos. I use Youtube with HTML5 as a workaround.

Using gnash works too.

Big thank you, scummos. gnash worked like magic. Problem solved
btw, how do you use HTML5 with YouTube?
cheers

Just enable it on http://www.youtube.com/html5.
That's a better solution than gnash, as about the only thing gnash does properly is playing youtube videos. ;p
Notice that HTML5 works for most, but not all videos, as not all of them have been converted to webm yet.

I opted in to YouTube HTML5 but all videos I tested are back to blue faces once again in Firefox or Opera. What I don't understand is that prior to updating to openSuSE11.4, everything worked fine on the same machine, graphics card, monitor etc. I started on SuSE since distro 9.1 and there were never any issues like this before.
Thanks again

"Blue skin" is an already reported bug which appears to nVidia users. The easiest way for fixing it is to enable hardware acceleration in adobe flash.

Create a file named /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and put inside:

Code: Select all

EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=1

However, even with this settings some people still face the same issue. To fix it you must apply this patch to libvdpau. Read more here.

Actually I'd try to fiddle with the Hue settings in nvidia-settings.

I am guessing randomly here because I have no clue what the driver makes of the hue value in the settings UI, but as stated previously it is set to -5. Now generally hue is presented between 0 and 360 degree, so assuming -5 is an indication that in fact the UI spans hue between -180 and +180 (-180 being 0 degree and +180 being 360 degree) that would put -5 at 175 degree and at 175 you definitely get that kind of blue.

Techy note of interest: human skin being excessively blue or green usually is a sign of hue being off by a 180 degree. Particularly if the skin has a dominant red component you'll get increasing blueishness going from 0 to 180 degree and increasing greenishness from 360 to 180.

I'm pretty sure that the red and blue channels are swapped, while the green one is unaffected. This wouldn't fit with the Hue theory.

Tried sshfox suggestion and created /etc/adobe/mms.cfg with and without gnash. Resulted in videos on Firefox not playing at all. Went ahead to remove the directory with mms.cfg and reinstalled gnash. Although I do not get blue faces anymore, only videos from YouTube are playing on both browsers (Firefox & Opera). those from Videojug or Vimeo does not play in Firefox and only displayed in a small strip in Opera.


Also, all other pages including google home page are not displayed properly. Example:


Strange...Chrome is the only browser that handles YouTube, Vimeo, Videojug correctly now. Seems like I can't revert back to where I started before gnash, html5 & dir etc/adobe/mms.cfg Seeing that its a NVidia driver issue, does it mean that when I do get another machine,NVidia graphics card should be avoided?

As always, I'm very grateful to everyone who offered their help.

As said, about the only thing gnash does correctly is playing youtube videos. Everything else will likely not work.