I had been having a lot of trouble with the Flash player plugin for Firefox on Ubuntu. When I first switched to Ubuntu, there was no Flash plugin for 64-bit Linux in general release. After a while, they published an "alpha" version, and it appeared to work. But after the latest Firefox upgrade, YouTube videos did not play and no error message was displayed to indicate any problems with the plugin.
A post on launchpad.net suggested using any of the following Firefox plugins:
- MPlayer (package name mozilla-mplayer)
- Totem (package name totem-mozilla)
- VLC (package name mozilla-plugin-vlc)
sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayerand restarted Firefox. Absolutely no problems. This is the way to go, rather than the Flash plugin.
That is, it's the way to go when it works. I haven't investigated the cause, but sometimes Firefox doesn't seem to know it ought to launch the MPlayer plugin. I suspect it has to do with the way the HTML is written on some sites. The observed behavior appears to be: When the page checks for the existence of the Flash plugin so that it can initiate a download for clients that don't have it installed, it finds a plugin associated with Flash video so it doesn't prompt for the download, but it also doesn't know how to invoke the MPlayer plugin, so you end up with nothing.
I've found that if I download the video manually, it will play just fine with MPlayer. Another workaround is to launch Opera and view the video with the "standard" Flash player in Opera. That seems to work without any problems.
I don't intend to invest much personal time on this problem. Based on what I've seen, my guess is that it boils down to a problem in the 64-bit version of Flash player for Firefox. When looking for answers I found a CNET article about the Firefox Flash plugin that suggests there has been a history of problems with that plugin ever since it was first introduced.
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