If you’re using the “Ubuntu Classic (No effects)”-mode in the latest Ubuntu (11.04 as of writing) there is an annoying problem with playing fullscreen flash – it doesn’t work. The picture will either freeze or get black, sound is still playing though, but there is no way you will get any fullscreen.
It took me a couple of hours to find it, but the solution, once you know it, is quite simple – just enable “legacy fullscreen” in compiz.
Simply install the ”compizconfig-settings-manager”
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Launch it, either by a terminal (/usr/bin/ccsm) or by, System => Preferences => “CompizConfig Settings Manager”
Once in the application, Click on Utility => Workarounds => Check the “Legacy Fullscreen Support” option.
Close “CompizConfig Settings Manager”, => log out, => log back in, and you should be able to watch flash in fullscreen.
Sidenote,
Depending on which backend you use (normally gconf) the settings are stored as follows,
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Update, 20110624
After playing with flash some more I find that this solution is not fully working. In fact the solution suggested above is incorrect (I have no idea why I thought it worked the first time – the problem seems to be random and flash just happened to worked when I activated “Legace fullscreen support”), because when using “Ubuntu Classic (no effects) you’re not using compiz at all (which makes sense when you think about it) which in turns would make the compiz-options useless (read, since compiz is not used, the settings aren’t either). At least that’s how I think it is, if anyone have any better explanation, please share it in the comments below.
After hours of fiddling with this I finally gave up, I thought I would give Ubunbu Classic a shot (using compiz that is) and flash actually now worked as expected (I tried with/without the “Legacy fullscreen support”, but I didn’t noticed any differences so I decided to just leave the option on). The reason in the first place why I didn’t want compiz and all the effects is because I think it clutters up my desktop, but with compizconfig-settings-manager you’re able to disable most of them, so for now compiz is enabled – only so I can watch flash in fullscreen on various sites.
Worth mentioning,
- When using Ubuntu Classic (No effects) I could get fullscreen to work if the browserwindow was not maximized. The video would then go fullscreen in the background (that is, behind the browserwindow) and as soon as I moved the mouse from the browserwindow to the fullscreen I would get a working fullscreen. However this is not a working solution for me.
- For some reason, now when I’m playing with compizconfig-settings-manager the settings seem to be stored in
$HOME/.gconf/apps/compiz-1/plugins/workarounds/screen0/options/%gconf.xml
instead of as I earlier thought
$HOME/.gconf/apps/compizconfig-1/profiles/Default/plugins/workarounds/screen0/options/%gconf.xml
Not really surewhats going on here though.
Finally,
If you could get the sites below show flash in fullscreen with
– Ubuntu 11.04 in Classic Mode (No Effects),
– Google Chrome,
– Native 64 Flash plugin (square)
– on an ION2-based platform,
please tell me how you did it.
– http://www.break.com
– http://www.imdb.com
– http://www.dump.com
– http://www.youtube.com
– http://www.ted.com
– http://www.wimp.com
– http://www.sf.se/
Update, 20110625
Disabling “Legacy fullscreen support” since it seems to break xbmc’s “quick fullscreen switching” (alt+backslash).
This is ridiculous.