Adobe Flash only works sometimes

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 17:53 -0700, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 11:49 PM, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 16:23 -0700, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> >> Greetings,
> >> I've got a few Fedora9(x86) systems with Adobe's flash plugin
> >> installed.  For most websites, the flash plugin works just fine
> >> (Youtube, etc).  However, there are some websites where flash doesn't
> >> work at all.  When I end up at a website where its not working, I have
> >> a big white square where the flash content should be, or sometimes, I
> >> get a nasty error that I need to install Flash.
> >>
> >> >From what I can tell, this appears to be due to some mime-type
> >> handling retardation in Firefox3.  If I go to Edit -> Preferences ->
> >> Applications, there are two different entries for Flash, "Flash video"
> >> and "SWF file".  The "SWF file" entry is auto-populated with "Use
> >> Shockwave Flash", however the "Flash video" entry keeps defaulting to
> >> "Movie player (default)", and Shockwave Flash isn't even a choice in
> >> the menu.
> >>
> >> I've (re)installed Firefox-2.x for debugging purposes, and the same
> >> exact flash plugin works perfectly there, so this has to be something
> >> specific to firefox 3.
> >>
> >> Anyone run across this?
> > ----
> > that seems fairly normal though you might want to install totem-xine
> > package and then you can register xine as backend with 'totem-backend -b
> > xine' command.
> >
> > (my setup registers totem-web-browser-plugin as the player for the mime
> > type video/flv)
> 
> This is normal behavior?  It seems completely broken to me.  I
> definitely shouldn't have to install xine to get flash to work, when
> i've already got the flash plugin installed (and it works in firefox2
> without any issues).
----
what I meant by normal was the way it registers the applications to use
for the various mime types but I'm trying to relate that things seemed
to work better after I installed totem-xine and selected xine for the
backend. I have seen others suggest removing the
gecko-mediaplayer-plugin but I haven't bothered to remove it myself.

you might try launching firefox from command line to see if it spits any
errors into the console.

Craig