Can't play flash movies on youtube but hulu is fine

[marko]

Tonight I came home and found Firefox 5.0.2 can't play youtube but can play hulu movies.

If I run in youtube, I get a black movie window and no controls, running firefox on the console shows this:

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

which doesn't make sense because I'm using the nouveau driver. Weirder yet, I get the same warning from hulu and it plays fine.

I know the libvdpau_nvidia.so file is from the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs package but I can't just install that because it would pull all the other nvidia dependencies and I don't want to install the nvidia blob driver (For some reason my 8800GT just won't work with the nvidia closed driver)

I'm using
Fedora 15 X86_64
flash-plugin-10.3.181.34-release.i386
nspluginwrapper-1.3.2-1.fc15.x86_64
nspluginwrapper-1.3.2-1.fc15.i686
firefox-5.0-2.fc15.x86_64

[scottfones]

This isn't very useful, but I can at least say I'm having the same issue.

We also have a machine running osx with the same issue. Everything works fine on both boxes in firefox, but chrome is a no go.

[marko]

Yeah, I tried
removing and reinstalling flash and the nsplugins -> doesn't help

going to adobe, running a test flash movie and the using that to go in the settings to turn off "hardware acceleration" (I read somewhere that inappropriately asking for H/W acceleration might make it look for the vdpau library and I don't have it) --> still a black empty box for the movie window in youtube.com



UPDATE --> I was able to work around this by installing the VideoFlashReplacer plugin, this runs the flash in a different player but puts
the window right where the youtube video would run. It's kind of spastic but it mostly works.

[scottfones]

Good to see you found a work around. I was just about to post mine; adding "https://" fixed it. No idea how/why this works, but it's a fix for now.

If I understood the difference, maybe it would point to the underlying problem?

[marko]

You mean instead of going to http://www.youtube.com you went to https://www.youtube.com and then it would play your movies?

[scottfones]

Yes, exactly that. I was away from the computer for a bit, but am now trying to figure out why this solved my problem.

[marko]

Weird, but I wasn't liking the Video Replacer plugin (it would constantly redo the video and it also didn't show the play time and the video time). So it disabled the plugin and tried the ordinary youtube player again.... it works fine now. No idea why it was broken before.

[gadgetwiz]

Yes, I've experienced the same problem. Out of nowhere, youtube videos do not load so all you get is a blank screen. Using https:// allows the video to load.

Certainly, the normal reaction is to think something is amiss with your system and start making changes but that's usually not the case.

I just waited until the next day and all was well.

From what I can gather, the problem occurs occasionally due to changes made by the folks at youtube and how it interacts with various versions of flash.