Joys of Adobe Flash

Just recently I had problems playing flash based videos through Google Chrome. In fairness this is only on Ubuntu. When I would play a video it would just start to stutter in places and the sound would fall out of sync with the video.

I first noticed the problem back when Chrome update to version 19 and I have only recently discovered why this was a problem. Chrome has a built in Flash plug-in and this plug-in was updated to version 11.3. For whatever reason this does not play nicely in Chrome on Ubuntu.

To fix the problem I used the steps below.

1. Open Chrome and type into the address bar: chrome://plugins
2. Click on Details to view more details about the plug-ins
3. Click the Disable link on the Shockwave Flash  11.3
4. Download and install Flash 11.2 for Ubuntu which can be found in the Software Centre
5. Open up a Terminal window
6. Type/copy in the two following lines:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/google/chrome/plugins
sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins

When I went to view the plug-ins for Google Chrome I noticed there were 4 Flash plug-ins. Shockwave Flash 11.2 was present there.

After doing this I noticed that any videos using flash worked like a treat. Problem sorted!