Sites that block Linux

gymnart · 10-30-2008, 12:29 PM

The FOX website has videos online and you have to install their player to watch them but there is no player for Linux

WB also does this and I'm sure that NBC also does this.

It's not just a browser problem, it's an "unknown" system problem.

What can be done for this?

mostlyharmless · 10-30-2008, 01:25 PM

Don't visit their sites

pixellany · 10-30-2008, 01:25 PM

Have you contacted Fox and WB?

(NBC video works for me)

Fox does not work, but I have no video player installed at the moment

gymnart · 10-30-2008, 01:32 PM

@ pixellany
Yes I did contact them and others too.
Fox won't work for you because their player is not for Linux, just Windows and Mac.

NBC's videos, well they work only some of the time. I think I managed to get one to play for me when I was testing out Adblock Plus' white list.

@ mostlyharmless
lol, yeah but if they are not told that there is another OS out there, then none of their coders will ever know that there is anything beyond Win and Mac.

estabroo · 10-30-2008, 01:52 PM

Try hulu.com a few Fox programs are viewable there and that just requires flash.

gymnart · 10-30-2008, 02:03 PM

@ estabroo
Thanks! That site works nicely!

i92guboj · 10-30-2008, 02:47 PM

If the sites look for the user agent you might be able to circumvent these problems by "correctly" setting it to IE or whatever, if there's some other black magic involved, all you can do is to poke them and try to convince them that internet is not a franchise of MS and Adobe.

gymnart · 10-31-2008, 10:12 AM

@ i92guboj
Thanks. Yes, I did try the Windows IE user agent setting but that did not make any difference. I filled out the feedback contact form after that.

jiml8 · 10-31-2008, 02:33 PM

I watch fox videos all the time using firefox with the adobe flash player. Works fine here.

There was a time not long ago when they did an "upgrade" and I was no longer able to view their videos, with symptoms as you describe. So I sent them an email and got back a canned reply after several days - something about technology upgrades that required windows blah blah blah.

So I stopped visiting the site.

After a couple of months, just for grins, I visited it again. This time, I was able to watch videos again. For awhile, the videos were choppy; seems the flash player was taking 100% (and more) of my cpu, but within the last few weeks, this has settled down and I now can see the videos without incident again.

What is going on? I don't know. Did Fox make another upgrade? I don't know. Did some routine upgrade to my system fix the problem? No idea. What I can say is that I am able to watch the videos with Firefox 3 on Mandriva 2008.1 and the 2.6.24.5 kernel.

I run privoxy. I also have the script defender plugin running in firefox, as well as the Greasemonkey plugin which uses the Foxnews Friendly Video plugin (kills the commercials).