this may be impossible: iis there a way to play streams on our firefox?

[Mike Clarke]

On Thursday 04 February 2010, Mike Clarke wrote:

> Is it just me or is the flash plugin still not fully functional? I'm
> running Firefox 3.5.7 with linux-f10-flashplugin-10.0r42 on
> 8.0-RELEASE-p2, some flash videos work but many fail. For example BBC
> iplayer always comes up with a message "This content doesn't seem to
> be working. Try again later" superimposed over a still image of the
> start of the video. YouTube videos play but without any sound.

Thanks for the replies which show that the problem lies with my setup 
rather than within the flash player. On further investigation I saw 
that about:plugins showed 2 different flash plugins, one from 
linux-f10-flashplugin-10 and the other from swfdec-plugin. Since the 
FreeBSD handbook explained how to install both these plugins I assumed 
that I needed to install both of them but I now see from the port 
description that swfdec-plugin can only play Flash 4 files so it's not 
surprising that this caused problems.

I've uninstalled swfdec-plugin and swfdec and things are much better, 
BBC Iplayer videos and YouTube work fine now. Oddly Iplayer still come 
up with the same error for BBC radio programmes but they work fine 
via "listen now" and I can download podcasts as mp3 files so I can live 
with that, especially since I don't need flash very often.

Since swfdec-plugin can't play recent flash files and hasn't had any 
development for over a year I'm surprised the FreeBSD handbook still 
explains how to install it and doesn't even mention that it conflicts 
with the linux flash plugin.

-- 
Mike Clarke