unable to stream video in firefox

Can you view youtube ok?

HI

YouTube is a good way of checking to see that everything is ok at your end. The site requires people to register and i don't like getting involved in things like that, sorry. Note there is a reasonable chance of their website not functioning properly or of the video just not being available for some reason. Can a different machine watch the movie?

It might be a good idea to sort out all your multimedia by working through all the steps in
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
I would keep using all the non-free components tho. Hopefully one day i will know enough and be able to get all the OpenSource components working well on my machine to really free myself.

Then this guide might help with flash-players
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/Flash

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

youtube works fine, i've never had a problem with that. I can view the video from other computers. I have tried mplayer, vlc, and gone through all of the steps and still won't work.

and it's not just that website it is any site streaming wmv

try:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Then restart all browsers and try again.

If that doesnt work can you please provide the output of:

lsb_release -a

Thanks

i tried and it still won't work...how do i provide the output of lsb_release-a

Its a terminal command
press alt+f2
tyep:
gnome-terminal
and press enter
then run the command and copy/paste the output here

Some other ways to reach a terminal to type commands into
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal#Starting%20a%20Terminal
then use the commands and copy&paste the results from their into here. CtrlV doesn't always wok but mouse-paste is always good :)
Regards from
Tom :)

bash: lsb_release-a: command not found

???

If you read the command its:

lsb_release -a

not

lsb_release-a

sorry..

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS
Release: 8.04
Codename: hardy

Just making sure you werent on karmic. Terminal is very handy for stuff like that.

It could be the lack of video plugin. I don't think its flash based looking at the screenshot.

You could try:

sudo apt-get --purge remove totem-mozilla; sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc

tried that and it still won't work...

Hmm, maybe you're lacking some codecs. Medibuntu repositories are the best for that ;)

Open up a terminal and type this there:

$ sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

and once the installation is over, type this to add the GPG key:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

You may be asked to accept this package even though it cannot be authenticated. This is normal; typing "Yes" means you trust Medibuntu.

Find more info on the Medibuntu community documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu

@Tom: You should consider taking a look at the "Optional Step: Removing the Non-free component" under the "Adding the Repositories" step on the Medibuntu community documentation if you want to get rid of those damned non-free packages. I work just fine without them ;)

Lol, i think that 1 step at a time is probably best. I just want people to know that using the non-free components is fine almost everywhere. Once people have their multimedia is not great in linux but it does sometimes seem to work quite a lot better with proprietary kludges. Once it's working then hopefully people will look into going the whole way confident that at least they can return to a state of everything working again.

I am not sure why it's not working in this case. In a very early step we got all the usual Medibuntu codecs installed and added the Medibuntu repositories so YouTube and streaming video should be working now.

It's possible that Adblock or some Block-Flash type add-on is somehow blocking everything or there might be some linuxy problem which AP or someone is likely to know more about.

I haven't yet tried going completely OpenSource but i am really happy with the way everything is just working fine for me right now. I live in England so there's much less worry about someone potentially asking me to pay up for using a non-free codec. If someone does ask then i will go OpenSource, i might even try it before then but i doubt it. Thanks for the advice :)

Regards from
Tom :)

OOops, editing while typing without going back to check the sentence still makes sense is quite dangerous! Sorry about that! The 2nd sentence should be "Multimedia is not great in linux but it does sometimes seem to work quite a lot better with the proprietary kludges."

Oh yeah, Tom, sorry about that, didn't see your first solution :$

Using proprietary drivers and codecs is totally fine in most countries and states, I'm in Portugal and honestly, they don't give a sh*t about this kind of stuff but I honestly prefer going all OpenSource on my Linux machines, for non-OpenSource I've already got a Winslows desktop ;P

Anyway, he should definitely check if he has the No-Script extension installed and enabled, it completely blocks everything Java. If not, run a LiveCD and try to acess Youtube from there. I had this problem the first time I installed Ubuntu on my laptop, I installed flashplayer and gstreamer but didn't restart Firefox or reboot my system, so when I tried to see a video on Youtube it would say "Unable to reach the server. Try later." so I just did a backup of all my files and a clean install of Ubuntu and this time around I restarted Firefox right after installing all codecs and necessary plugins (including the non-free components :P) and it's all fine until now. ;)

Brilliant plan. Trying the LiveCd to see if YoutTube works from that is definitely worth trying
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

It starts a whole fresh un-tweaked Ubuntu and you can gradually do things like install the restricted formats
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/
and add in "adobe-flashplugin" and then try doing the whole of the Medibuntu page to see if YouTube suddenly starts working at some point along the way.

Of course you can't update the LiveCDs session because the updates take tooo long and are too heavy but at least the Adobe flash player and other newly installed stuff would be up-to-date anyway.

Trying a LiveCd might give us a clue if the problem is in the updates or add-ons and might help us work out where to look.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hi :)

Have you been able to try the new Ubuntu 10.04 before it gets officially released?
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/testing/lucid/beta2
Trying it as a LiveCd or as an extra dual/multi-boot would be ideal. Developers and everyone are keen to try to iron out any problems before 10.04 gets officially released so you might find faster & more effective answers to your bug reports which would make 10.04 work better on your system for you

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)