Flash videos often don't work

Flash videos often don't work

Okay, there's no Flash 8 for Linux but this is not causing the problem.

On www.gamespot.com and on Google Videos I find that I cannot watch the videos streamed through some kind of Flash / Javascript frontend.

However, that actually does work if I'm using Firefox. Both use the same Flash 7 plugin, so obviously Flash is not to blame.

Then again, the very same Opera (any version at all) with Flash 7 on Windows instead of Linux does play those Streamed videos.


So what could be the problem? And how can we get that fixed?

Care to post a specific link we can look at?

The main page at http://www.gamespot.com ... The flash video will be on the right side of the screen with the label "Now Playing" atop of it's element, and there is a large play button beneath. It should be relatively easy to find. It doesn't really have a direct link that I could post because it's right there when you're on the main page.

Works well here - Opera 9 weekly build 145, Flash 7.0.61.0.

Opera 8.x doesn't support scriptable plugins, they are working on that for the next version.

Now I've updated to weekly version 145 of Opera 9 as well. Furthermore I've updated my installed Flash to version 7.0.61.

Previous to this I was using the build from http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/Weekly-1656/intel-linux/ ... it's Opera 9, a weekly version, number 1656.

If you can do it with Opera 9, same version and Flash, same version, why can't I? Nothing happens at all when I press the play button. Normally there should be a loading Icon and then playback of some clips is supposed to start.

I've run Opera 9 from scratch installation with zero changes to it's initial setup, went straight to GameSpot and got the same result. Same on www.tv.com, which uses the exact same flash player on it's front page. Firefox can do this with no problems using the same plugin, just like it did before. So the plugin itself is fine.

I'm ... confused.

Do you use a proxy? Some proxies will disable Flash in a page.

Nope, there is no proxy .. normally I use the built-in filtering and all popup blocking that I can. But since I used a fresh intall here that is not a possibility in this case.

Upon pressing the play button, the small video window normally should show you a small circle made out of dots, indicating that a video is loading. The round circle isn't displayed here. I really need to find out what exactly is supposed to happen beneath the surface of this, and at which point it precisely fails here.

Are you sure you were running the exact same O version I was, using the same flash plugin, on the same OS, meaning Linux? I already know that this works perfectly using Windows. At least my friends Windows. =/

What else could be at fault? If it isn't the flash plugin, and if it isn't really the browser since you're using the same, it must be the OS? Or the X Server? Or Qt? Or the pluginwrapper? Damn ... I'm lost.

Here's another, who can't get Flash videos to play. I've tested on both my desktop (Opera 9 build 1635) and my laptop (Opera 8.52 build 1631), both running Flash Player 7.0.61 on Gentoo Linux.
I'm also totally mystified, since Flash video works flawlessly on Firefox. And no, I don't use any proxies, tried with one, with the same results.

Referring specifically to the Gamespot link?

You are identified as Opera, yes? (F12 menu)

There are sites which don't work in Opera, if you're talking about some other site you'd need to give me a link so I can look at it. But that Flash video on the right hand side of Gamespot works great here. (They just now had a preview of "The Outfit", followed by a promo for a live chat this afternoon, followed by a "Welcome to Gamespot" which I didn't wait through.)

The only other thing ... there are two file types which should be associated with the Flash plugin. One is application/x-shockwave-flash, the other is application/futuresplash. I didn't look at the page source to see which one they actually use. Oh, and do you have Java? Some plugin facilities connect through Java, you may also need to have Java enabled.

Yes, the Gamespot link is what I used for testing now, though I first noticed it on video.google.com, eg. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6734250401481740830
I am identifying as Opera (anything else is heresy! )
Hadn't thought about Java, it was disabled (but working), but sadly enabling seemed to have no effect whatsoever. Checked also those MIME associations, they'd seem to be okay.

I did not find the whereabouts of the MIME extensions list ... I thought it was somewhere in the preferences but it seems to have been moved somewhere else.

Yes, Java is installed and tested, and the GameSpot video is not showing with Opera being set to identify itself in all available choices (checked them all with full restart of the browser and reload of the page).

By the way, I too am running Gentoo Linux. At the moment O9 is not statically linked with Qt, but only because that wasn't available in the current weekly release. All releases I've been using before that were statically linked. So I guess Qt can be ruled out as the bad guy as well.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to be mystified, but ... I guess that's not a good thing.


PS: And yes, Google videos don't work for me as well. I guess it's for the same reason. Whatever the reason may be. "Buffering" it says ... but it is not really loading the video according to gkrellm's activity network-O-meter.

Strange ... that works too. Not well, it pauses after about every 3 seconds of play in the latter part of the video, but my DSL connection is pretty slow. (384K)

(Naturally don't recognize the soccer player the piece is about, we don't hear much about European sports here.)

Flash does work properly on Macromedia's test page? Which version of Java (you can find out from Tools > Advanced > Java console)?

Actually, the Google page starts automatically, it shouldn't depend on Java.

Flash works on the testpage ... Shock wave does not work at all (but I guess that's to be expected),

Java vendor: Blackdown Java-Linux Team
Java version: 1.4.2-01

Do you think there may be something wrong with how Opera works in Gentoo Linux? =/ I'm beginning to think that, but I cannot even begin to understand where it might go wrong.

Only way I'd be sure is if you try with Sun Java. There may be incompatibilities between Sun and Blackdown which prevent LiveConnect from functioning.

Macromedia doesn't have a Shockwave for Director (aka Shockwave) plugin for Linux; unless you're using Crossover to run the Windows plugin, you can't get the Shockwave plugin to work.

If indeed Java is the culprit I'd still like to know why or how Firefox does it using the same Java engine. Okay, Java's latest original Sun runtime environment implementation is installed now and Opera is setup to use that instead, telling me accordingly in the Java console.

However that does not improve with the problem we're facing.... the flash movie still will not load or start.

Note that Adobe (who now own Macromedia) just released a security update to Flash, the new version is 7.0.63.0 (for Linux). Shouldn't change anything though as far as this issue is concerned...

I don't know, frankly I'm out of ideas. Flash does work, but not videos - but there doesn't seem to be anything which would stop Flash from loading the video (no proxy or firewall).

I know this is a bit out of proportion, but if you have access to a Gentoo system, could you test it yourself at home?


You seem to have by far the most experience with Opera for Linux, and frankly, you're the only one who responded, so I don't really have anyone else to turn to.

Filing this a a bug is probably not right because it might not actually be Opera related. The only thing in common with the problem was so far that both users are using Gentoo Linux.

Thanks for the notification on Flash, I'll disable it for now and update it when the update is available in portage (should be like, tomorrow or somethin').

Gentoo is one system which I don't have. I have Mandriva 2006 (on this machine), openSUSE 10 and Fedora core 3 on my older system, and my dad has Ubuntu on a 333 MHz Celeron. It might be interesting to try Gentoo out, but it takes about 4 hours to download an ISO on my network, and that's if I'm not doing anything else ... so probably not feasible at the moment.

Okay. I've posted a the link to this thread on the Gentoo message board ( http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-443875.html ). Maybe Opera users from over there will help out testing wether this is working for them or not.

Thank you very much for your help this far =).

same problem here (opera 8.52, flash 7.0.63, gentoo)

no solution on the gentoo message board as well yet (more people with the same problem, though)

another example: the flash based audioplayer on myspace.com
(e.g., www.myspace.com/blackhalos)

any help appreciated

I got the same problem, flash generally works, but for e.x video.google.com or youtube.com just doesn't work.
I`m on Ubuntu Linux, running latest weekly build

After some testing I've found out that the premissions are ok. Instead, opera can't display the video if the plugin is located inside a directory named "netscape" [examples below]. This must be a problem with the Opera Proxy plugin, afaik, and probably not gentoo related. If someone could test this so we're sure, it'd be great.


This one dosn't work. Plugin hangs at loading videos.

sugh plugins # pwd 
/test/netscape/plugins 
sugh plugins # ls -la 
total 2118 
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    1024 Mar 22 21:06 . 
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    1024 Mar 22 21:06 .. 
-r--r--r-- 1 root root     856 Mar 22 20:58 flashplayer.xpt 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2154768 Mar 22 20:58 libflashplayer.so 

This works just fine:

sugh plugins # pwd 
/test/plugins 
sugh plugins # ls -la 
total 2118 
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    1024 Mar 22 21:09 . 
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root    1024 Mar 22 20:57 .. 
-r--r--r-- 1 root root     856 Mar 22 20:56 flashplayer.xpt 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2154768 Mar 22 20:56 libflashplayer.so 

This one also works fine, so it can't be related to the depth of the directory structure

/home/slegge/test/plugins/install_flash_player_7_linux 
sugh install_flash_player_7_linux # ls -la 
total 2114 
drwxr-xr-x 2 slegge users     120 Mar 22 21:11 . 
drwxr-xr-x 3 slegge users     152 Mar 22 20:31 .. 
-r--r--r-- 1 root   root      856 Mar 22 21:11 flashplayer.xpt 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 slegge users 2154768 Dec  9 01:44 libflashplayer.so 

PS: Might actualy be a problem with the plugin itself, although it works in firefox so i doubt that is the case.
PPS: uhh, unless firefox copies the plugin to its own plugin directory that is. If it does, then it might be the flash plugins fault.

Confirmed. I'm closing the bug on Gentoo, thanks so much for your help!

Would you please file this as a bug at Opera or Flash instead? I'm not sure where to exactly put it.

If there is some reason why Opera won't accept any plugin in a folder with "netscape" as part of the path, that would be an Opera bug. If it is only the Flash plugin, then their installer must be handling netscape differently - installing a different version, for example.

Since I used Macromedia's installer, I just told it to install to /usr/lib/opera and that works fine. Though I went back and installed to /usr/lib/mozilla so Firefox and Konqueror could also find it. (Standard locations on a Mandrake system for those.)

http://www.gamespot.com/
down the page right side
fight the fear
http://www.gamespot.com/tournaments/fearmar06/tv.php?tag=ftf_psbox_hp&tr=gstourn
it want me to download something
any idea what that is

It's a WMV file, you'd need to open it in some appropriate media player. Here's the info Kaffeine shows me:

        Tournament TV
Artist: GameSpot
Length: 0:38:31
Mime:   video/x-ms-wmv
Audio:  MS Windows Media Audio 2 (ffmpeg) 9kb/s
Video:  Windows Media Video 9 160x120

Since I don't have the Windows codecs installed, I can't see the video, but the audio is fine.

bug reported

Thanks sgunhouse
thought my computer had the latest codecs thats why did not click yes on the microsoft thing.
how can we we be really certain its from microsoft