Flash videos not playing in Firefox or in Chromium browser in ubuntu 16.04

[monkeybrain20122]

Should I follow this?:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmA_Rug8koU

Then install Firefox (for Windows)? (Don't know how yet, though).

Is this method easier than the 'freshplayer plugin (install) way?;

There are a few tricks for the wine method. First of all if you use wine you will most likely fail to install flash. The trick is to use playonlinux, set up a 32 bit wine prefix then install firefox and flash 32 bit into the same prefix (or install firefox in playonlinux, then check only the box shockwave player when prompted. there will be an error if you check flash) then there is a bug in wine that Firefox would not connect to the internet when restart. You have to go to about:config and change browser.tabs.remote.autostart2 to False. There are some other glitches associated with wine like some windows not rendered properly, some foreign fonts may show up as gibberish etc.

The freshplayerplugin method is most elegant and it is not that hard following my step by step tutorial. It is seamless, doesn't involve wine and even hardware acceleration works.

[deadflowr]

I've always found linux mint's method of getting flash on wine to be one of the better methods:
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2028

[Dennis N]

The trick is to use playonlinux

I agree. I also installed Windows version of Firefox using Play On Linux back in January, but followed similar advice here from user autodave:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread....0#post13596670

There is a difference in that user autodave said not to install shockwave; only install flash player, while user monkeybrain20122 says to install only shockwave. Maybe either will work but not both?

I also tried the Mint method before this, but for me it failed on the flash player install part.

Anyway, the final result met my expectations. I can login into the TV network websites with my cable provider password and watch content I am entitled to.

The next challenge for me was how to upgrade the flash player in Windows Firefox when the player starts getting blocked as out of date. Going directly to Adobe website to install flash only gave me an unspecified error. Finally succeeded, but only after a lot of trial and error with Play on Linux. Not obvious.

Good Luck

[monkeybrain20122]

I

The next challenge for me was how to upgrade the flash player in Windows Firefox when the player starts getting blocked as out of date. Going directly to Mozilla website to install flash only gave me an unspecified error. Finally succeeded, but only after a lot of trial and error with Play on Linux. Not obvious.

You can just download flash from Adobe, then use playonlinux to install it in the Wine prefix where FF is installed instead of doing it through Windows' FF. For a new install I found the most straight forward way is to set up an empty wine prefix first, down load flash and Windows FF separately and then install them one after the other to the same prefix (order doesn't matter) rather than trying to get playonlinux to fetch flash while installing FF.

But my recommendation is to use flash from Chromebook recovery image (not flash from Linux Chrome, it doesn't work for DRM) and freshplayerplugin like I posted above. It is the best and most elegant method and works much better than running FF in Wine. Wine is always the last option IMO.

[Dennis N]

You can just download flash from Adobe, then use playonlinux to install it in the Wine prefix where FF is installed

Thanks. I will try that next time it needs replacement.

[electrodan]

Hello,

I thought I would post a follow up for those who come looking to get flash working.

The instructions monkeybrain20122 posted were very good and I used this method even in Ubuntu 18.04, however things evolved a little.

Firstly - it doesn't work in Firefox 60 (shows white screen where flash content should be), or Chromium (DRM error). I worked around this by installing Firefox ESR 52:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/firefox-esr
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-esr

It seems to work OK alongside Firefox 60, but don't run two at once.

Fresh player install has been updated, so instead of:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt update
sudo apt install freshplayerplugin

Do this instead:
sudo apt-get install browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash

For getting the libpepflashplayer.so the instructions worked great but note that ZAKO has moved so has a new ID. It has to be this one or you could get an incompatible ARM version.

I spent many hours trying to get it working in Firefox 60 or Chromium, and also hours trying to get Firefox and flash working well inside wine - all with no luck (not useful errors). So hope this helps someone!

[monkeybrain20122]

Hello,

Firstly - it doesn't work in Firefox 60 (shows white screen where flash content should be), or Chromium (DRM error). I worked around this by installing Firefox ESR 52:

Hi,

It works on FF 60 here on Ubuntu 18.04. Problem is, as you observed correctly webupd8's freshplayerplugin is out of date (may not even be available for Ubuntu 18.04). FF made some changes around version 52 or 53 which broke freshplayer but it was fixed later. Not sure how old is "browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash", probably still old if only works with FF-ESR. You need to compile freshplayerplugin from source for it to work for FF 60.

While bionic was late beta someone sent me a pm about this, here was the up to date instructions I cut and paste from my reply, still works:


So you'll have to compile flashplayer from source. The steps are also a bit different from that forum post. You need to install chrome to get its pepperflash to "initialize" freshplayer (but it won't work on drm) When all is done chrome can be removed and its copy of pepperflash deleted.

1) Remove flash you have installed from the repo (adobe-flashplugin or flashplugin-installer, something like that) and delete the freshwrapper.conf you have created following the forum post

2) get chrome-book's image and extract flash as in the forum post. Put it somewhere, say /home/usr_name/PepperFlash

3) Download chrome. It seems that Chrome no longer bundles flash by default. In the url bar type about:components. Check the flash tab, if it is a bunch of zeros that means it is not installed, click update flash and it will download and install pepperflash in your machine.
Note the full path of pepperflash it installs. On my machine it is

/home/monkeybrain/.config/google-chrome/PepperFlash/29.0.0.113/libpepflashplayer.so

Edited: the path for Chrome66 is now /home/monkeybrain/.config/google-chrome/PepperFlash/29.0.0.171/libpepflashplayer.so, also Chrome does download flash automatically, probably some glitches on my beta install back then.

4) compile freshplayerplugin.

Download the source code as a zip file (click the green tab clone or download) here. .
Before you start compiling you need some build tools

sudo apt install build-essential cmake

Now just follow the instructions to install the prerequisites and go through the build steps, they are pretty straight forward (just cmake -options .. and make, don't do make install)

5) When you are done building. Close firefox. Open your File manager, find the hidden file .mozilla , create a subfolder called "plugins" (without quotes) inside. Now go in your freshplayerplugin folder, inside the build folder you can find libfreshwrapper-flashplayer.so, copy it to ~/.mozilla/plugins

6) Inside the freshplugin folder there is a subfolder called data. Rename the file inside as freshwrapper.conf, open it with an editor, go to line 40 pepperflash_path, remove the # in front and change the path to where chrome installed its flash, in my case it is, as above

/home/monkeybrain/.config/google-chrome/PepperFlash/29.0.0.113/libpepflashplayer.so

change enable_3d to 1 (line 46)

7) copy the file from step 6 to ~/.config

8) Now open Firefox, go to Tools > Addons > Plugins to check that flash is there, it should be version 29
Now freshplayer is initialized (at this point you can uninstall Chrome and delete the copy of pepperflash it installed)

9) Close firefox, and edit freshwrapper.conf again, go to line 40 and change the path to your chrome-ook flash in step 2. (you need to initiaze freshplayerplugin because chrome-book's flash apparently has different versioning, if you skip 6 -8 an go directly to 9 Firefox would report flash version as 0.0.0.0 and none of the flash site would load)

10) start Firefox and do the drm test.


P.S Won't work for Chromium, I have asked the dev of freshplayerplugin.

[electrodan]

Thanks for your help.

I managed to get it to work in an acceptable fashion. An alternative to sort Firefox detecting the plugin as version 0.0.0.0 (which makes no flash content work) is copy manifest.json to the location of where I had copied the DRM version of Pepper Flash, in my case:
cp ~/.config/google-chrome/PepperFlash/29.0.0.171/manifest.json ~/PepperFlash/

Then after deleting pluginreg.dat from the Firefox profile directory - it shows a version now and works - so there was no need to initialise it back to the Google Chrome version.

In Firefox Quantum (I have version 60) though, the video performance is pretty poor (whereas in Firefox ESR is fine), until at least I make the video full screen - and then it is fine! It's a good 20 seconds or so before I can actually move the mouse to the full-screen button and I've not managed to solve that so I might still stick with Firefox ESR for now. If I do fix it I'll report back though. Computers with stronger processors may be fine though - I'm using a very cheap Celeron N3350 laptop for traveling with!

[User-007]

Wow! Got it working on Mint 19, HBO Nordic works now.

Thanks a lot!

Regards
User JB

[Jan-Olof_Andersson]

HBO Nordic now works great with 18.10 and Chrome. Just to run it!!! Finally