Youtube videos with strange colours

Today, I started noticing strange colours in Youtube videos. But strangely, this did not occur on all videos.

Looking more closely, the difference between the two kinds of videos (beside the colours) was the player. As I have ‘subscribed’ to the Youtube HTML5 test, some videos use the HTML5 player. And these showed their true colours like before while the Flash player did some strange swap between the red and blue colours while other colours seemed unaffected. This resulted in some weird effects. People looking like smurfs was the most noticable one.

I thought it was an April Fools Day joke.

As it turned out, disabling hardware acceleration in the Flash settings (right-click, choose Settings > Screen tab) solves the issue… No hardware acceleration any more? Bummer. Well, at least I do not have to watch The Smurfs all the time! 😉

To be complete, I should mention my PC specs:
Dell Latitude laptop with Nvidia graphics, using the nvidia proprietary driver on Ubuntu 11.10 64bit and the Gnome3 Shell desktop.

Alternatively, switching to the open nvidia driver (by switching OFF the proprietary driver in System Settings > Prorpietary Drivers and rebooting) also works. No need to switch off hardware acceleration in Flash then…

Hope someone can use this info to get rid of those pesky smurfs too!