Ubuntu no longer playing online video

[Jerriy]

Things are not going well. I can no longer play online streams.

[Jerriy]

Dunno what happened but all of a sudden there was this rather unusually long auto-update (took 30-plus munutes - usually it takes less than 3 minutes)

Then it all went haywire - since that dodgy update I am not able to play any video. It starts loading and buffering and loading and buffering and on and on and on. Like as if Ubuntu is playing 19th century voodoo with my computer's 21st century (quad core²) capacity.

What have I already done to solve this? Among other things: removed flash and even removed firefox and installed them again... but to no avail.

[Jerriy]

Is there a conflict between canonical and Adobe?

What is going on? Something obviously