How I banished YouTube pink-psychedelic-dust casting Pixies from my Win7 system

Note: this worked for my system specifics…might not work for your rig.

Some time ago I had upgraded my older Shuttle SK41G small-form-factor PC from XP to Windows 7 RC 1 when I lost a volume in a serious-bad way.

It has a AMD Athlon XP 2400+ single-core CPU, 2 GB RAM, a ATA HDD, and a Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS series AGP dual-head card.

The Windows 7 install went great. I loaded up a bunch of extra software and stuff and it seemed quite nice.  In fact, it got a higher “windows experience” rating than my dual-core notebook…probably due to the graphics card.

Anyway, the only “issue” I found that bugged me was that when I tried to play YouTube videos in any of my web-browsers, I got a psychedelic pink pixilation effect in the video playback window.

Bizarre!

 

and

 

(screen caps of playback from this YouTube - Top 10 Dumbest Indiana Jones Moments - Cinemassacre.com link)

My hardware/device driver list showed no errors.  I had done repeated tweaks to the custom Nvidia “control panel” settings to no avail.

Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera, it didn’t matter.  They all generated YouTube Pink Pixie Dust playback effects for YouTube.

To add to my madness, when I downloaded and played video through the Hulu - Labs: Hulu Desktop client, the video playback was smooth as silk and pixie-dust free. Same thing for Quicktime based videos.

It wasn’t a bandwidth issue as this was connecting via my broadband on a cat-6 wired cable.

None of my other Windows 7 systems were exhibiting any issues.

I was stumped…until last night when I realized what the issue/solution was.

YouTube Pink Pixie Dusters Begone!

Last night found me working on the desktop system after doing the rebuild of Lavie’s laptop.

I had just (again) updated the Shuttle desktop systems Nvidia drivers to the very latest versions, just released.

• NVIDIA DRIVERS 195.81 BETA – Windows 7/Vista x32 bit driver released 2009.12.15
• NVIDIA DRIVERS 195.62 WHQL – Windows 7/Vista x32 bit driver released 2009.11.26

Unfortunately neither helped.

However, while catching up on my RSS feedage, I saw this notice:  Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 now available for PCs and netbooks over at Adobe Labs.

I knew I had installed the 10.1 beta 1 on the system and wondered if this might fix the issue since, yep, YouTube video format is Flash based.

I did so and, no, the Flash 10.1 beta 2 version didn’t help at all.

The Light Brightens in Claus’s grey-Jell-O mold

“Wait!” said I.

If neither the Flash player 10.1 Beta 1 or Beta 2 worked, but other video formats do just fine, might it be related to the Beta version of Flash I was using on this rig and NOT, say, the Nvidia driver(s)?

So I uninstalled the Flash player 10.1 Beta 2 for both the ActiveX and “Other” browser components from my Add/Remove programs list.

Then I went back to the Adobe Flash Player Download Center and downloaded the “current release” versions of Flash player.

Then I replayed the same YouTube video link as above.

 

There was Indy-Jones running for his life in all his smooth and crystal-clear goodness.

Problem solved.

For some reason the Beta of Flash player 10.1 isn’t having any issues on our Windows 7 laptops (x32 or x64 bit Win 7).  However either the NVidia card I was using and/or the drivers and/or the Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 level was causing the Shuttle rig to attract the YouTube pink pixie-dust Pixies.

Rolling back to the current Flash version fixed the issue easily.

I’ve seen a handful of comments while troubleshooting this issue that seems to indicate other folks also running into the YouTube pink video playback effect.

Maybe this might help…maybe not.

In my case it did.

Now I can watch YouTube things like this that I too really, really need (thanks Isis!) with no pink pixie dust included.

Cheers!

--Claus V.