I have a duel boot computer with linux mint 17 and windows 7 professional. I use Fierfox on both os's as my primary browser. On windows 7, when I run a yahoo.news article with a video, the video plays just fine. In linus mint 17 when I try to run the same article, I get the message "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again after a few minutes." every time. I have looked on all the message boards and have found no fix for this problem.

Do you have any problems running videos from other web-pages?

...and additionally:

is the flashplugin installed?
can you install a different browser (chromium or midori) and try with that?

another thing you can try:
open a terminal, start firefox from there by typing "firefox" and enter.
then do what you do until youget to the tricky bit.
see if firefox gives some meaningful errors/warnings at that moment and post them here.

I was unable to duplicate the problem on Mint 17 with Firefox v. 32.0 and Adobe Flashplugin 11.2.202.400.

I would add to ondoho's suggestions to test in a different browser; this could show whether it's a Firefox problem or something larger.

I recently saw that behavior on Youtube. A video would begin to play a few seconds, then turn to "static" with the message "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again after a few minutes.".

I ignored it the first time I saw it and it appeared to clear itself by the next time I went to youtube. But it happened again at a news site a few days later and I began to get curious.

It turned out that I was doing some other work on that machine and had the sound driver disabled. Apparently it is a Flash param or control that wouldn't play the video without a sound driver and gave that message. Loading the driver fixed it.

Don't know much more about it but in my case that was the problem and the fix...

Windows 7 is more friendly with flash than linux is. Make sure you have flashplayer or flashplayer-nonfree installed.

I can acknowledge this problem. When there is a sound problem youtube doesn't play. In my case I was using alsa and the sound card numbers were mixed up. I am not sure the OP uses alsa in Mint 17

Other than that, I am completely fed up with messages as "please try again later" which are very common nowadays. What is the use? Hope that you have installed something which made the error go away? Installed a new app? Bought a new device in the mean time? Oh, let us not scare the user there is something wrong. Lets just tell to try again later. Hopefull he'll forget/

jlinkels

Thanks. Yes I agree, and it is the wave of the one-size-fits-all future it would seem!

In the bad old days, the video would have played and I would say, "Hey! There is no sound! I better look into that!". But now the super helpful captive programming wizards stop the video from playing and tell me, ever so courteously, "Please try again later...". Since the video stopped I am never aware that the sound is broken on my machine but must only assume that the problem is on their end... so I come back later, guess they are still having problems... ad infinitum. And in the case when I discovered it, the video did not even have a sound track when I finally saw it!

FWIW, it must be configurable in the player params (i.e. per site) because when I encountered it, other sites would still play - that is how I finally noted that I had removed the sound driver!

That is right: some sites still would play. It seemed to be a slow detoriaton, at a certain moment more and more sites would stop. IIRC it could also happen when Chrome was on a youtube page (not playing anymore) and I tried to play a video in Opera.
I have never found any player settings (in the browser? in flash?) where I was able to adjust this.

On my current laptop I use Pulse and never had the problem with videos not playing. As a matter of fact, Pulse is remarkable stable in Debian Wheezy and does what it is expected to do. Even in an intuitive way.

jlinkels

weather.com/video/anything in LM17 on Firefox and Chrome is another great example.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopi...177327#p918317

but http://news.yahoo.com/video/obama-re...054129571.html
is working from here on Firefox 27.01