Flash player will not work in firefox - attempting to view youtube videos.
Hello,
I wish to look at youtube videos - using the latest firefox browser, running on Suse 12. When I enable the plugin, I get a blank screen where the video is supposed to be. When I disable, I get a little box saying I need to enable Flash to view the video. Either way, I am unable to view any youtube video using firefox. I also get the same result using the standard KDE/ Gnome Bundled browser. I have also tried running as SU and the same result. I also had a look on the YAST repository and downloaded something named "Gnash" as a RPM. I think I managed to install that but it made no difference, other than presenting another plugin in the firefox browser. I am afraid I am no Linux Guru and struggling to understand how something as "basic" as this seems to be eluding me.... any help appreciated. I have had a search for other similar threads on Linuxquestions but did not turn up anything. Joe. |
What are the contents of your /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory? Firefox normally looks for plugins in that location.
You can try this:
That has always worked for me. If it doesn't work for you, try starting Firefox from the command line, viewing a video, then looking in the terminal to capture any relevant error messages. In fact, you might try that right now, before you do anything; the error messages might tell you something useful (and they might not, but it's worth a try). |
Thanks Frank,
I have investigated a little more and something loads in firefox, and mt old 2.2 ghz single core AMD goes to 100% and stays there until I close the browser or move away from the page with the video I am trying to play. Does this suggest what the problem might be....?! |
Is flash installed or is firefox using flash? To check, open the firefox browser and type this in the URL bar and press enter.
Code:
about:plugins BTW, adobe is stopping flash support in linux, but 11.2x versions is still available. |
Thanks, I will check the plugin status.
If Flash is to be discontinued in Linux, are there other similar alternatives that I should be looking into?! |
There's Gnash and Lightspark - but neither of them are up to the standard of Flash, yet.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ http://lightspark.github.com/ |
Quote:
To view youtube videos, type this Code:
mplayer $(youtube-dl -f18 -g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9I6nlsXzM) Code:
youtube-dl -f18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9I6nlsXzM -o "%(title)s.mp4" |
Youtube has an html5 trial which serves you html5 videos with fallback to flash when unavailable.
You could give said trial a try and see whether it solves most of your problems (if you have a firefox >14 you should be fine). |
Thanks Guys for your suggestions - most of which are way above my noob head.
I do have the latest firefox installed (version 18). I could not for the life of me figure out the mplayer thing - as far as I can tell I do not have it installed. I tried the "sudo" commands to install the downloader and not sure if that worked or not either. I tried the suggested line commands and I just get "google failed to find what you were searching for" - suggesting that the mplayer command and the other one are not recognised in the URL field. I also checked the plugins and the latest version of flash is there. There was another one which appeared to be "gnash" and I disabled it. This made no difference either. I tried a bbc iplayer page as well and this did not work - but not sure if BBC bothers to support linux based stuff. I have also noticed that when I click on a video on youtube, my CPU goes up to and stays at 100% until I close the tab. Apart from this, I remain totally lost! Could it be that the flash bit is fine and it's my video / driver that is letting me down? I have a dual boot and my other WinXP partition loads and plays full screen youtube videos no bother at all. |
You say your processor is AMD. Is it 64- or 32-bit? If you have a 32-bit AMD, the answer is here
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...us-4175420481/ |
a Flash at the end of the tunnel
Hi David,
This looks promising - I run my linux installation on a socket A Barton core AMD CPU which is indeed 32bit as you suggest. I will set about applying version 10 rather than 11 of Flash and report back on the findings... Many thanks Joe :D |
My CPU is 32bit as you suggested, I have managed to download from the link in your other post the Flash10 player and will have a go at following the rest of your instructions on installing.
I had a look in YAST2 and I could only find Flash11 as an install option. Many thanks Joe mcmorj@Athlonux:~> cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 6 model : 10 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+ stepping : 0 cpu MHz : 2187.691 cache size : 512 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow up bogomips : 4375.38 clflush size : 32 cache_alignment : 32 address sizes : 34 bits physical, 32 bits virtual power management: ts |
This might help
|
You might also try installing Chromium on your system. It comes with built-in flash or something else that will play your YouTube videos. It's probably easily installed from your distro's repository.
|
Thanks everyone for your suggestions but..
... whilst mincing about trying to install flash plugin 10 I managed to uninstall KDE. Or at least that's what I think I did. I just got an old looking grey xwindows terminal where KDE used to be.
Amazingly enough, when I found a tiny menu bottom left, firefox was there and it would play youtube videos. However, I decided to reinstall Linux taking the opportunity to got from SUSE 12.1 to 12.2. It seems I am now back to square one with firefox not showing the video but CPU usage running at 100%. I will have another go and removing the flash player 11 plugin and install version 10 as previously suggested. I also installed Chromium before I trashed KDE but that did not work either. Chromium seems to want to employ flashplayer too. Another thing I did was install "gnash" and although Firefox said the plugin was there, the video would run with errors appearing in the video screen, but no video. |
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