Chrome has a lot of nifty small features that make the software so great. The fact that it automatically updates the Flash plugin along it’s own program is one of them.
Unfortunately this can backfire sometimes. As a Linux user I currently don’t get hardware-accelerated decoding of video with the stable version of the Flash plugin Chrome ships.
Reading up on the topic I found the usual symlink tips that I believe are not the ideal solution. A better one is this:
- Install your own choice of Flash plugin (for me it’s 11.2 at the time of writing)
- Go to about:plugins
- Expand the “Details” on the right side
- Scroll down to the Flash plugin and disable the very first entry
- Restart Chrome and enjoy
This way I can still maintain my own Flash version with full hardware-accelerated video-decoding while having a safe fallback in Chrome in case the beta goes haywire. Cool stuff.
