I have Ubuntu 9.10 with Firefox 3.5 but I have never gotten videos to play (example: At surveyor.com there is a CNN video and this will not play).

I've read other posts that mention removing and reinstalling, issues with gnash and more, but all of these seem to refer to older versions of Ubuntu and Firefox so I thought I would post this anew to see if there are different processes or files I should be trying.

Thanks,
T. Jump

Hi,

to play videos from an internetsite you'll have to use Adobe flashplayer. There are other programs like gnash or vlc and many others which play downloaded multimediafiles like *.wmv or *.avi (although there are plugins for example to integrate vlc into firefox).
Did you install Adobe flashplayer?

Markus

I do have Adobe Flash Player plugin installer (flashplugin-installer package).

mh, do you mean that you have the package, but not installed it? If you have installed the flashplayer, there must be a file "libflashplayer.so" in a folder "/usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/"(this is true at least for Ubuntu 10.10). Please check this.

Markus

Yes, I have libflashplayer.so in the usr/lib/flashplugin-installer directory.

Well, and if you open a clip in youtube, what happens then? I've tried the site you mentioned in your first post of this thread, I can play the videos with flashplayer.

Markus

Same as with the CNN video... I get a grey window with a play arrow and when I press it I get an all black image in the video display/where the video should be playing.

I found something about hardwareacceleration referring to your problem...,
Click right into the black window where the video should be and select preferences. You may chose acceleration or not.

Markus

I did the right click/properties but there was no option for acceleration. I then did right click/About and get a window about Swfdec 0.8.2. I'm wondering if my video is trying to play through Swfdec instead of through Adobe Flash Player and how I change this if this is the case?

Well, I don't have the english Menus, but look into the preferences of Firefox. Somewere in the Menu: Edit->Preferences->Applications, there is configured, which application belongs to which content.

Markus

Edit: you might update Firefox and Flashplayer as well

At this point I'm stuck. I can't find any place to set Adobe Flash player as the default for Firefox. It is defaulting to Swfdec and this is certainly not working. I don't know if this needs to go under a new thread or what, but this certainly tells me I don't have my Ubuntu system fully set up.

Another question, how does watching Hulu impact what video player is running?

Hi,

since I'm not an expert in this things I'm stuck as well, I'm trying Ubuntu yet and don't experience any problems with video-sites.
I'd recommend to try an update for both, firefox and flashplayer. Maybe this solves your problem.
You wrote you're running firefox 3.5, an older version. Afaik there can be compatibilityproblems between firefox and flashplayer. The recent firefoxrelease is 3.6.12 and the flashplayer..... well, I see that Ubuntu comes with a lot of multimediaplugins ..... look in Extras->Add-ons->plugins...... maybe this causes an incompatibility, I'd try to disable all and look whats really needed.
I'm using Ubuntu since 3 days now. But with Gentoo I didn't install that many plugins.

Markus

I did find that Swfdec was a problem. I removed this and the grey arrow is gone. Still no video playing but it looks like I'm making progress.

I finally got video to stream. What I needed to do was remove both Swfdec and Gnash (the "free" video streaming tools to replace Adobe Flash Player). Maybe removing the Adobe Flash Player would have resulted in Gnash working, but I read more than a few posts about issues with Gnash, and Swfdec is defunct since 2008 so certainly not a platform to move forward with. I know the desire to have open source platforms is high, but they need to work and/or be supported better if users (especially new users) are going to embrace them. This has been a bit of a pain and could have been avoided if these "free" add-ons would not have been installed by default.