CENTOS 6.5 (32 bit) Chromium-browser Adobe Flash Player vs. Pepper Flash Player

I'v switched to Linux from Windows for a while now. No need to mention why, right !
Everything was working fine until today, but if you are using Linux for for a while now, you might have already faced a problem with a multi-monitor setup and flash 11.2.
But I'll still take the leverage to explain it a lil bit to keep the context clear.

The Issue :

So here it goes, I like to work and watch videos side by side. I have two monitors and I usually play an online video / a already downloaded movie in VLC in my secondary monitor and keep my working stuff on the primary.
Today for the first time I tried playing a flash video with Mozilla and adobe flash player, I found the following errors while trying to full-screen the video:

  • The video full-screens only on the primary monitor, no matter the embedded/browser window is.
  • If I accept the above fact and tries to use the secondary monitor for work, the video minimizes to the embedded mode as soon as the full-screen mode looses focus.
So finally you cannot multitask with a full-screen flash video playing.

The Root Cause :

After a little googling, I came to know this an already known bug in adobe flash releases. This really is a big shame on Adobe, not to fix it till now. I am not really sure which version first triggered this issue (mine was 11.2.202.508), but I am damn sure it was not there from the beginning.

The Pain Time :

It was really a long search and a lot of options jammed my mind. Explaining this part just to save your efforts a lil, so you can really skip this long pain time details.

I tried Installing linux alternate for flash player. GNASH or LIGHTSPARK did not worked for me.
Then I tried playing/streaming online videos using VLC .
Next I tried to install Chromium-browser, but I found no flash player plugin installed for it.

What to do now ? After some more research I found there is another version of Flash Player maintained by google called Pepper Flash. I am all time fan of google so finally decided to give it a try.

So I started researching more, but now I had a target. I somehow knew what to look for.

The Solution :

STEP 1 : Run the below listed commands to get pepper flash in your machine.

  • cd /tmp
  • wget https://raw.github.com/hughesjr/chromium_el_builder/master/chrome_pepperflash_copy.sh
  • chmod +x chrome_pepperflash_copy.sh
  • ./chrome_pepperflash_copy.sh
This will install pepperflash in some directory like "/tmp/google_chrome/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/" in my case.

STEP 2 : Then type "whereis chromium-browser" which resulted into below in my case :

[deep@localhost bin]$ whereis chromium-browser
chromium-browser: /usr/bin/chromium-browser /usr/share/man/man1/chromium-browser.1.gz

Now you know from where chromium-browser is loaded from. (i.e. /usr/bin/chromium-browser)
Remember "/usr/bin/chromium-browser" is not a directory though it looks like one.

STEP 3 : /usr/bin/chromium-browser is the shell script that prepares the chrome-browser for start up. But we just need to note that it reads for Pepper Flash.
It tries to look and load 2 files listed below in a directory structure (now I'm not going to tell you how to find which directory for your system, use your imagination and skills. I used mine.). im my case the directory it looks into was "/opt/chromium/PepperFlash/". The files it looks for was :

  • libpepflashplayer.so
  • manifest.json
so move the entire folder content "/tmp/google_chrome/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/" to "/opt/chromium/PepperFlash/". You can make the directory "PepperFlash" in "/opt/chromium/" if it does not already exist.

STEP 4 : Start OR Restart chromium-browser. Enable Flash from "chrome://plugins/" (typing it in your chromium address bar).

Wallah you are done :)

Let me know if you need some help on this. I'll be more than happy to "TRY" to help you out.

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