Issue with reds, blues and greens on video playback

Question

Newbie here. Trying desperately to overcome this problem of neon-like color and distortion when I play a video. Often the sidebars of basically non-video screens (like email) have the same sort of wild colors and they often flicker.

It seems the consensus advice is to disable the hardware acceleration of Adobe Flash Player in the Settings tab (seen by right clicking on the video), but I've tried that and the box won't uncheck.

I've also tried the F11 method (below). No luck. What I need help with is implementing Method #1 (below, italicized). I know how to use the terminal and the advice doesn't seem that complicated, but if you could break it down into a step-by-step process for me, I would really appreciate it. Thanks! P.S. the problem and solution as stated below are from the superuser forum.

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Problem:
The latest official version (and supposedly the last version for Linux) of Flash player has some interesting issues on Linux systems. The biggest issues which have summarily been confirmed on the Ubuntu forums are:

YouTube videos have a red / blue color overlay Flash content shows through on other windows How do I fix this?

Solution:
The commonly accepted solution to this issue appears to be disabling hardware acceleration for Flash player. This is usually accomplished by right-clicking the Flash content, selecting Settings and then uncheck the Enable Hardware Acceleration option, but in the affected version of Flash player, it isn't possible to uncheck that particular option (clicking it does absolutely nothing). As such, the following two work-arounds exist for disabling hardware acceleration:

Method 1: Create (or edit, if it already exists) the file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and add the following configuration parameter to it: EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0
Method 2: Open a YouTube video and enable fullscreen mode. Then right-click, select Settings and uncheck the Enable Hardware Acceleration option. For some reason this only seems to work when Flash player is in fullscreen mode.

Answer 1

"Method 1: Create (or edit, if it already exists) the file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and add the following configuration parameter to it: EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0"

$ sudo nano /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

This will open the mms.cfg file in a text editing program called nano which should exist on your system. Sudo tells linux to run this command with privileges as the files in the /etc directory are system files. If you aren't in sudoers, you will need become superuser, and then run the command without sudo:

$ su
# nano /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

Edit: The above is two commands - including the linux prompt at the beginning of each line. Hence, while you have a '$' prompt, type in su<Enter>. This will make you superuser. Linux lets you know you are superuser by changing the prompt to a '#'. Then, from the '#' prompt, type nano /etc/adobe/mms.cfg<Enter>

_{NB: If this comes up with a 'command not found' error, you may not have nano on your system. This means you'll probably need to edit the file in vi. Vi is not intuitively obvious for new users due to its modes. It is probably easier to show you how to add nano to your system than to show you how to edit it in vi.}

Once you're in nano editing the file, add:

EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0

to the file on its own line. If it is blank, just put it in as line 1, otherwise, look for some appropriate location, or add it to the end. When editing /etc files, I usually add a comment line immediately above my edits, something like:

# added by mcalex to make flash run properly.  see:superuser.com/questions/blahblah #

but that's just my paranoia. The comment makes most sense above the command, but can go anywhere without affecting what you're doing. It doesn't matter what goes in the comment; it is for your assistance if you need to look at the file a year (or 5 years) later.

Now the file needs to be saved. In nano, use Ctrl-x to exit, and nano will ask if you want to save the file - hit y, and then <Enter> when it provides the file name. You need to look at the bottom of the screen to see the nano prompts for saving & filename.

That should do it.