Any way to programmatically disable hardware accelerated h.264 video decoding in silverlight 5?

17
votes

We are getting reports from our Mac users that some of their video is playing back garbled. This only started happening when Silverlight 5 was released. This release included hardware video decoding acceleration for H.264, which is the codec we use. We have found that disabling the hardware acceleration through the Silverlight Preferences solves the problem.

Does anyone know of a programmatic way of disabling the hardware acceleration? We have thousands of users on OS X, and would like to preemptively fix this issue for them. Other ways of solving the issue from our end would also be welcome.

Relevant details:

Update

  • It doesn't happen consistently, which is making this problem harder to solve. Some videos will play OK, and others will not. All the videos are encoded the same way.
  • It happens in Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
  • This is Mac OS X only, it doesn't happen at all in Windows.
  • It happens on several different models and revisions of Macs. Mac Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, etc. We haven't found a particular model that never has the issue so far.

Update 2

  • Reproduces with Silverlight 5.0 and 5.1

Update 3

  • This is in-browser (hence the browsers listed above)

Here is an example of the garbled video

silverlight 5 garbled video

The preferences setting that fixes the issue

silverlight preferences

2
macosvideoh.264silverlight-5.0hardware-acceleration
Have you opened a bug at Microsoft Connect (connect.microsoft.com)? - jv42
I haven't yet. I was hoping we could find a workaround since a bugfix will take some time. - Bryce Kahle
I agree that an official bugfix might take a long time, but raising the awareness at Microsoft about the issue might still help, and maybe they'll have a workaround to suggest. - jv42
Hi @BryceKahle.. did you find a solution for this? we are also experiencing the same problem you had mentioned above. we also have many mac users... - Allan Chua
@AllanChua unfortunately, no. There currently isn't a way to programmatically disable it. - Bryce Kahle

2 Answers

1
votes

You mentioned several browsers, so I assume you're hosted on a page. See if this does it for you:

<param name="enableGPUAcceleration" value="false"/>

in the <object> tag on the HTML page hosting the plug-in.

0
votes

If it is Out of browser application you can turn off GPU Acceleration in OOB settings enter image description here