YouTube Flickering Scrubber Issue in Chrome

I've been having a weird buggy issue with YouTube videos in Chrome lately, and it happens to me across multiple computers in different geographic locations, so I don't think it's just me.

During playback if I move my mouse over the scrubber bar (that's the area that shows the playback/download progress and also previews frames from the video), the preview thumbnails never disappear and just keep flickering on top of the video, as pictured below.

Just me or everyone?


radx says...

It's just the Chrome/Flash combo and embedded YouTube videos, right? HTML5 embeds working fine?

If so, you can either switch to HTML5 or try this workaround for the time being: deactivate hardware/GPU acceleration for both Flash and Chrome.

1) Add "--disable-accelerated-compositing" to your Chrome shortcut, so that it links to: /chrome.exe --disable-accelerated-compositing
2) Right-click on the video -> settings -> left-most tab -> uncheck hardware acceleration
3) Restart Chrome

Again, that's just a workaround until they fixed whatever is wrong with it.

lucky760 says...

Glad you pointed that out @sanderbos.

I did a bit of experimenting and determined the cause of the issue is the "wmode=transparent" that we use in the YouTube embeds. This value is necessary because without it pop-up contents on the page are hidden under the video, but it causes the flickering preview thumbnail...

sanderbos says...

When it started happening I always had the idea that it is caused by the banner ads in the youtube videos. It is in that general location where youtube's banner ads appear, it usually happens a few seconds after the video starts playing, and it doesn't matter whether you you 'scrub' or not (insert TLC no scrubs link here).

seltar says...

Ok. The fix I reported above didn't stick for me, for some reason.
So, I tried inserting an iframe-embed with the wmode set to window instead of transparent or opaque. It seems to support both the menu overlaying it, and no flickering.
Worth checking out?

lucky760 says...

Good idea. I've put in that fix for now. Hopefully that will resolve all related issues.

seltar said:

Ok. The fix I reported above didn't stick for me, for some reason.
So, I tried inserting an iframe-embed with the wmode set to window instead of transparent or opaque. It seems to support both the menu overlaying it, and no flickering.
Worth checking out?

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