How to disable flash hardware acceleration

If you are experiencing either of the following problems:

  • Black Square
    Users see a black square where the video player should be, this means the Flash file does not load properly.
  • Double video frame
    Users see the video playing in double, with a green line splitting the player in half horizontally.

These may be caused because you have updated your Flash recently and Adobe has been modifying how their Flash player handles video playback (it may have automatically updated for you, or you told it to update when prompted) you may be experiencing issues regarding video playback. Following the steps below should fix it for most users. In order to resolve the problem, please turn off hardware acceleration of your Flash player. To do so, please follow these very simple steps:

  1. Right click on any Flash animation on your browser.
    Please note: If you are having the "black square" problem, please try another Flash file!
  2. Next, click the "Settings..." line.
  3. The Flash settings dialog box should show up, as seen below:
  4. Uncheck the "Enable hardware acceleration" checkbox.
  5. Click "Close".
  6. Clear your cache, close your browser and try viewing our videos again.

How to roll back your Flash player to 10.1

If disabling Flash Hardware Acceleration (above) doesn't resolve the problems for you, rolling back to 10.1 seems to be a workaround for now, at least on Windows machines. In the steps below, the download of version 10.1 has Mac files for the installer.

To fix this, roll back to version 10.1.102.64, using the following steps:

Uninstall the current Flash player:

  1. Go here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
  2. Look for the uninstall_flash_player link and download it.
  3. Close all browser windows.
  4. Run the uninstaller.

Install the previous version of the Flash player:

  1. Go here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html
  2. Download version 10.1.102.64.
  3. Close all browser windows.
  4. Unzip the files.
  5. In the extracted folder, open the folder "Flash Player 10.1.102.64" .
  6. Open the folder "10_1r102_64".
  7. For windows users, the file flashplayer10_1r1102_64_win.exe is the one you want. Double-click to execute it and launch the installer.

After installing version 10.1.102.64, videos should once again display properly.