Damn Flash Player! Adobe, fix it!
Adobe Flash has ever been a great source of anger due to many bugs (see here for example) and security vulnerabilities. Anyhow, it has evolved into a widely used technology and many, many websites need it to function correctly (yeah, HTML5 is coming, let's hope it will replace Flash in many places in the near future).
Adobe's bug fixing behavior has never been great and we all know, that Flash for Linux has been permanent beta (or alpha) since we can remember, but enough is enough. There is a severe bug that has now existed for three years, reported by hundreds of users. Adobe closed this report without taking action. Now it has been reported again and I want you to vote for it. Please!
This bug is about fullscreen (what else) in combination with NVIDIA's TwinView. Some users might say „Why don't you use some different, open technology?“ Well, TwinView is easy and simple to use, although it lacks some basic features such as direct access to Video LUTs for color calibration etc. And of course it is much more advanced and easier to handle than separate X screens (which e.g. don't support direct rendering properly). It just works and therefore many people (including myself) use it for now.
So, what is the bug about? The bug is that Flash doesn't get the size of the current monitor right and some people also say that the fullscreen always opens on the primary monitor (however, I wasn't able to reproduce that).
This results in white (or with the current square release from Adobe in black) borders around the content if your monitors are different in size (and sometimes even then when they are in fact equal). For me this is very severe as I have a 19" SXGA monitor and a 27" WQHD monitor. When I watch videos on Vimeo or any other Flash video content it looks like this on my big monitor (it's fine on the small one, though):
On YouTube I could notice similar phenomenons occasionally, but as of the time I'm writing this it seems to work fine there (but YouTube has always been a bit special as they seem to work around some Flash bugs by themselves).
Some few people claim having found workarounds (this guy for instance, who has written some C code to tell Flash the right screen resolution) but none of them worked well for me and if so, then just in some browsers for some websites. Therefore please vote for this bug to be fixed very soon.
Originally, this bug was reported back in 2008 but after lots of comments it was closed without a solution. A few days later a new instance was opened, but apparently it was at the wrong place. Now there is yet another report for that in Adobe's new bug tracking system where it is still open for comments and for voting. Please do the latter and tell Adobe they shall eventually finish coffee break and go back to work after three years.
I hope, we can bring Adobe to fix this bug now, but maybe it is also time for alternatives, don't you think so? Perhaps we should give Lightspark a try. Will it work? We might know more later.
Update 06:37 PM:
YouTube hasn't fixed this for their player. I was just so foolish to use a video for testing, which existed in my native screen resolution. Here is how it looks with a 1080p video on my WQHD monitor:
The smaller the video the smaller the image area and the bigger the play controls. Yeehaw! Love it!
Not really.