One of our summer interns has stayed on during the school year to work some weekends on special projects. This past weekend, her assignment was to trouble shoot problems with Firefox when trying to view various on-line training videos.

At some web sites, the video associated with the page will not play and we get the messages shown below.  The Download statement is actually a link and was used to download this rpm file: adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm.

“Cannot Play Video”

“The latest version of Adobe Flash is required to play this video.”

“Download the free Flash player here.”

The intern did not install this rpm because doing so outside of yum did not seem like a good idea.  We also do not really know how the Adobe Flash utility is called up by Firefox and whether or not the installation would solve the problem or possibly cause other problems.

This problem is not happening on our Windows 7 machines, but not everyone here has a Microsoft machine to use.  On Windows, the Firefox occasionally updates itself when launched so that might explain the difference.  The training videos always do play on Windows 7 systems when the web pages are brought up.

We also noticed that on Windows 7 there are no Firefox related processes remaining after closing all Firefox browsers. This is not the case on our CentOS 6 systems as indicated in the output below.

Is this video viewing issue a common problem, and if it is, can someone provide some direction to correct it.

Thanks.

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[user@computer ~]$ ps -elf | grep firefox

0 S user     3872     1  0  80   0 – 68607 poll_s Nov08 ?
00:00:00 /usr/lib64/firefox/bundled/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher

0 S user     8178  8149  0  80   0 – 25832 pipe_w 19:42 pts/2
00:00:00 grep firefox

[user@computer ~]$