CentOS – Firefox And Flash

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So, how does one enable flash video and audio in Firefox-31.4.0esr?

5 thoughts on - CentOS – Firefox And Flash

  • One installs the flash plugin from Adobe and configures firefox to either run it automatically when needed, or to ask if you want to allow it to run, every time (which helps prevent malicious crap from using flash unnoticeably).

  • If one has already done all that and, following the most recent FF
    update, all that is displayed is a video window with the Flash logo/Button in the middle. And regardless of how many times one clicks on said button no video will show or sound will emit, what then?

    I went into YouTube and switched to HTML5. Then, and only then, the original problem videos would play when revisited.

    This is not much of an annoyance for me since watching YT is not very high on my list of things to do. Curiously, in many cases linking to a YT video though an outside website allows videos to play when directly accessing the same video from the YT site displays the symptoms reported above.

    I realise that Flash is post-consumer agricultural waste for the most part and that it is riddled with security flaws. And I realise that FF is ‘not for the enterprise’ to quote one of their official spokesmen and is regularly updated to block ‘dangerous plugins’ to prevent the children running FF from injuring themselves. But, I have staff that are reporting similar problems when trying to access training videos on other sites. Systems with more recent versions of FF fail to play while those people with older versions have no problem.

    Unfortunately we work in a regulatory regime that requires constant updating and the government contractors providing the updates tend to use Flash as their preferred platform, albeit not on YouTube so the html5 setting is not available in those cases. So, I need some way of overriding this ‘fascist nannyism’.

    Is there a way to stop FF blocking Flash or do I revert to older versions of FF to regain the functionality? I am fairly confident that Canadian Government is not going to pay to have this material redone in OGG/OGV/OGX.

  • What firefox plugins do you have installed that might be blocking flash?

    I personally don’t use flash stuff much, but I have noscript installed and it makes me either allow javascript or click on the embedded flash content to view it. But so far it always seems to work when I either allow javascript on the site or click on the content.

  • update, all that is displayed is a video window with the Flash clicks on said button no video will show or sound will emit, what then?
    flash?
    installed flash either

    I thought that was the case too. However, disabling NoScript for YouTube does not change the observed behaviour. It is decidedly odd in that the Flash video will not play until one sets the enable html5
    option in YouTube.

    One of the artifacts of switching the html5 on in YT is that upon returning to the video page the video canvas shows an error message, with the ‘Try again later’ tag. But simply clicking on the video frame a second time starts the video.

    I am not sure what is going on. I have discovered that the same approach (switching on html5 in YouTube) has solved this issue for a least one of the impacted users. I will try it on others as the occasion permits.

    It seems to me likely to be a FF issue at its core.

  • I solved that for Firefox 35.x.

    I added some symlinks to $HOME/.mozilla/plugins

    Here is the list of symlinks:

    [drlove@kanc ~]$ cd $HOME/.mozilla/plugins
    [drlove@kanc plugins]$ readlink -f *
    /usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
    /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libgnome-shell-browser-plugin.so
    /usr/lib64/IcedTeaPlugin.so
    /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/librhythmbox-itms-detection-plugin.so
    /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-cone-plugin.so
    /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-gmp-plugin.so
    /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-mully-plugin.so
    /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so

    I have not made java work though, but I have 31.x for that if necessary