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Thread: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

  1. #1
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    Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    Are there drivers I need to load for Firefox to play videos on YouTube? I get a black screen with a spinning circle.
    Also Movie Player doesn't work either!

  2. #2
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    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    Do you have flash installed?

  3. #3
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    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    You need to install the flashplugin to play flash on firefox. There is a firefox extension called "Flash Aid" that will install the best linux flash plugin it can find for you automatically.
    Alternatively if you just want to watch youtube, you could join their HTML5 beta program. HTML5 is set to replace flash in the near future - at least as far as watching videos is concerned. A third option is to switch from firefox to chrome (or chromium if you want the unbranded version). Google signed a sweetheart deal with Adobe which means chrome has better flash support than firefox these days.
    Life's a pitch. And then you sing!

  4. #4
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    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    Get the firefox extension "Flash Aid".As for the movie player,you might need to install some plugins to play the files.For this,try opening any video file with the movie player.You will automatically be notified that you need to download the plugins to play the file.You can download the plugins then.

  5. #5
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    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    I'm having the same problem the OP is having. Please forgive me if I'm not allowed to chime in here, but this is my first post in these forums and this thread seems like the best place to comment on this particular issue.

    In a nutshell, my concern is whether or not there might be a hardware issue for all of those of us struggling with this problem. I know it's complex, due to the unwillingness of Adobe to cooperate with the Linux community, but is there also an issue with the nVidia drivers? I'm seeing a lot of information that indicates there is, but rolling back the drivers hasn't had any effect on my machine.

    I just put a fresh install of 12.04.2 LTS Desktop on an Athlon 2500 XP platform PC with an nVidia GeForce2 MX/MX 400 graphics card, and try as I might I can NOT get YouTube videos to play on either Flash OR Chrome. I've been researching this for weeks, trying all kinds of things (including Flash Aid), and have gotten nowhere. No matter what I do, when I pull up a YouTube video in Firefox I get a white screen where the video should be. Sometimes if I mouse over it I can get it to turn black, but nothing ever plays. If I use Chrome instead, I get the message that Flash needs to be installed. So I go through the steps to install it and go back to the video but it STILL won't play. I just don't get it.

    Oh, and both Chrome and Firefox offer me the option of viewing the videos in HTML5, but when I try to do that I get some message about MIME type not found. Another dead end.

    I've been in the PC world for over 30 years, but am a total Linux noob. Any help and/or explanations will be welcomed.
    Last edited by MightyOtis; March 7th, 2013 at 09:50 AM.

  6. #6
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    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    Well I've installed "Flash Aid" and that didn't help. Can't see anything with HTML5 either!!! Everything worked well under the last version of Ubuntu I had (10 something) Now this upgrade 12.04 is giving me a hard time. I'll get it working sooner or later though....

  7. #7
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    Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus

    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    Did you install "ubuntu restricted extras" from the software center? That gives you all the codecs, flash, etc that you need...

    Google Chrome (which you can get as a deb file from their website) is a nicer browser and it also has it's own flash and even a built in pdf reader...download it, right click and select "install with software center"...
    But either way, you should make sure you get the restricted extras package...
    Last edited by craig10x; March 7th, 2013 at 09:49 PM.

  8. #8
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    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    @MightyOtis the Athlon 2500 does not support sse2 which is necessary for using newer flash releases.
    You will need to downgrade to an older flash version.
    See this thread that has ways to do that. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1953796

    You can find out if your processor supports sse2 by running in the terminal (ctrl+alt+t)
    Code:
    cat /proc/cpuinfo
    hope this helps.
    Last edited by arpanaut; March 8th, 2013 at 05:23 AM. Reason: fixed command
    Castles Made of Sand,
    Fall in the Sea,
    Eventually!

  9. #9
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    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    Quote Originally Posted by arpanaut View Post
    @MightyOtis the Athlon 2500 does not support sse2 which is necessary for using newer flash releases. You will need to downgrade to an older flash version. See this thread that has ways to do that. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1953796 You can find out if your processor supports sse2 by running in the terminal (ctrl+alt+t)
    Code:
    cat proc/cpuinfo
    hope this helps.
    @arpanaut: THANK YOU! This was what I was looking for. I tried cat proc/cpuinfo but it told me there was no such file or directory.

    I'm hot on the downgrade tip, however. I've already downloaded Flash version 11.1.102.63 as the link you gave me specified, but when I went to copy the .so file into the plugins directory (~/.mozilla/plugins/) there wasn't any plugins directory and the extensions directory was empty - so I created the plugins directory and stuck the file in there.

    When I do about:plugins in Firefox it shows Shockwave Flash 11.2r202 at /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer,so AND Shockwave Flash 11.1r102 at /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so. Don't know what to make of any of that, but it doesn't look good to me. My first impulse is to copy the libflashplayer.so from version 11.1.102.63 into /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/, but I don't want to mess anything up....

    UPDATE: I tried copying the libflashplayer.so from version 11.1.102.63 into /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/, but that didn't work. So I used Flash-Aid's Advanced Mode and pointed it to
    http://github.com/downloads/webgapps...ux.i386.tar.gz
    instead of downloading the tarball, and restarted Firefox. Lo and behold, it now works! After weeks of wrestling with this thing and mountains of research, it works. Thanks arpanaut. I owe you one - maybe even two... :)
    Last edited by MightyOtis; March 8th, 2013 at 05:26 AM. Reason: update

  10. #10
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    Re: Can't play videos on YouTube with Firefox

    I screwed up I left out the "/" before the proc part of the command, my bad.
    It should work by just putting the .so file in the plugins directory you created, have you tried using flash on say youtube?
    See also: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...1#post11951782
    Castles Made of Sand,
    Fall in the Sea,
    Eventually!

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