Video Shuts Down in Chrome on Slackware 14.1
 

Hi there,

I run a 2008 Thinkpad R61i with the Intel X3100 video GPU on the 965GM chipset. I recently updated from Slackware 13.1 to 14.1 on this machine. I keep /home on a separate partition and this is the first upgrade with that setup.

I installed Chrome 38 from the Slackbuild in /extra. I also installed the flashplayer-plugin from /extra, though I don't think that has any bearing on this (see below).

When in Chrome, if I play any video content, the laptop's video stops output entirely. Even if when close X down and return to the console (I still boot to command line and invoke startx to launch Openbox, and can close it gracefully), the video doesn't work.

I can easily play videos in Firefox without issue, and play local video content, so the hardware itself doesn't seem at fault. I'm of a mind that it's Chrome's PepperFlash causing issues.

I moved ~/.config/google-chrome/ to ~/.config/google-chrome_backup/ and relaunched Chrome, let it create a new config hierarchy, and the problem persisted. I had thought that maybe some profile setting had been corrupted or such. If so, this didn't fix it. I can go to the Google Dashboard and "Stop and Clear" synchronizing to force a refresh but I'm not sure that would address the issue.

I had thought that Chrome would "recognize /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins as a valid plugin directory" per the Slackbuild, but maybe this is no longer the case given that Chrome stopped support for NPAPI architecture as of version 35, that is, I (now) assume that Mozilla's plugin is unsupported and that the PepperFlash plugin is the only game in Chrome.

All this preamble now out of the way, two questions:

• is there a way to force Chrome to either update PepperFlash or to use another plugin; and
• if this happens again, should I (carefully) modprobe i915 to reload the video driver?

You may try Alien Bob's chromium and pepper-flash packages: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/new-...-dev-packages/ http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/adob...time-december/ .

If this not help, you may try running chrome(ium) with "--no-sandbox" parameter. This helps for crash on my AMD with fglrx. But be aware that this lower significantly chrome security.

Also you can experiment with GPU flags in "chrome://flags/" (enter this as url in chrome) or gpu commandline options.

Thank you for the note. I tried Chromium on 13.37 (I was wrong above when I said I'd upgraded from 13.1) and I didn't care for it much, especially as it seemed to need a variety of dependencies I didn't feel like dealing with. Could be I'm misremembering. In any event, I'll give that a shot.