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Question

Video only starts playing when full file is cached

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
April 2, 2017
3 replies
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Flash Player version: WIN 25,0,0,127

Debug Player: No

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0

Browser Version: 5.0 (Windows)

Browser Name: Netscape

So last week I did some maintenance on my PC which included updating software, cleaning temp files and reg using CCleaner.

Ever since then some video players don't stream while others work perfectly fine (?). The ones not working only start playing the "stream" file when it was fully downloaded / cached. At that point it plays if with no issues. Having Flash behave like this totaly defeats the point of having Flash...

I have installed, uninstalled flash, delete browser data and settings (flash entry on control panel), browser, tried reverting reg, deleted temp files / folders, windows restores and nothing... Not even a fresh install of Portable Firefox with no extensios works for those specific sites so it's not the browser settings...

This happens in my home network. I'm not sitting behind a firewall other than Windows default, I saw no entries for Flash there, and assumed this is not the issue because the player can actually load the stream file and cache it, even if it fails to actually stream.

One of the affected sites is https://www.mp4upload.com/

As stated, once the whole file is loaded, video playback works. Before that it just sits there...

Any help on how to fix this?

Would be nice if Adobe Flash Uninstall .exe actually solved it but had no luck there (doen's it clear every trace of Flash from the OS? it should...)

This topic has been closed for replies.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

Yeah, I didn't think that it would resolve your issue, but would provide confidence that comprehensively removing Flash Player and any associated state didn't resolve the problem (and hence, indicates a lower level issue).

When this happens, it's because something is broken underneath us. You don't seem to have any of the usual suspects installed, but I'm pretty confident that you would not see this behavior on a clean install. (You could fire up a VirtualBox or VMWare image with a clean OS install on the same machine to confirm).

For what it's worth, I see one of these about every six months. We have a monthly install base in the billions, so everything that can possibly go wrong comes up in pretty high numbers.

I know that there is a state that a Windows machine can get in that leads to this behavior. I know explicitly that there are a couple software packages that play with the browser and networking stack that will frequently be associated, but ultimately, something is wonky with how streaming data coming in from the networking stack behaves.

My belief is that we (Flash Player) ask the OS to establish the stream, but do not get any data from the stream until the system has fully cached the transfer. I have no idea why that happens, and we haven't seen it in our labs before.

It's also unsurprising that it happens on some streams vs. others, as we support multiple video streaming technologies, some of which use their own network facilities. In general, the browser will be the intermediary, but that's not always the case.

A

alentexAuthor

Participating Frequently

My laptop has an HDD and an SSD, both with Win7 Home Premium x64.

The only reason the HDD still has an OS is because I haven't backup everything... Flash is still working correctly on the HDD on an older version of Palemoon... Guess it's no HW related...

Also on the SSD OS (the one with the problem), the Internet Explorer version works without any problems... Only Firefox and Palemoon (and other Firefox branched browsers I suppose) are affected... Haven't tested Chromium browsers as I don't like them much (different Flash version also right?).

Tried the following but without any luck (Link Removed by Moderator)

I'll try uninstalling and reinstalling the wifi driver without much hope...

If I don't find a solution guess I'll need to reformat my SSD to solve this... What a drag...

PS: If it is an underlying OS problem, what I can't understand is why does Flash work normally under Internet Explorer and not under Firefox (different plugin version I understand... but wouldn't an OS problem affect both?)

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

We're generally asking the browser to do the networking, and I'm sure the implementations between Firefox and IE vary greatly. This doesn't seem weird to me at all.

What happens if you use a clean Firefox profile?

https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Install-and-Update/Use-the-Profile-Manager-to-create-and-remove-Firefox-profiles/ta-p/291…

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

I've seen this behavior described a couple times and have investigated it enough to be confident about the answer that it's not a Flash Player issue.

What you're describing is not a widespread behavior, and resolutions in other instances consistently came down to third-party software or system configuration changes that are not directly related to Flash Player. The usual suspects include video downloader plug-ins, third-party software firewalls, obscure "security" or "internet protection" suites, etc.

I don't have a smoking gun, but I would start by process of elimination. In some instances (security, firewalls), you may need to actually uninstall the software before the behavior resolves itself.

A

alentexAuthor

Participating Frequently

MS Security Essentials + default Windows firewall.

Same behavior with MSE real time protection + windows firewall off.

Same behavior after MSE uninstall + windows firewall default reset.

No other security app running (have Malwarebytes Free as ondemand scanner only).

Again, a fresh portable Firefox (which is pretty much self sustained in terms of configs) with zero extentions suffers the same problem. Same with Palemoon.

Internet Explorer Flash is working fine though.

No drivers were touched before and after I noticed the problem.

The only thing left seems to be Flash itself...

Any way to remove every trace of Flash to try a cleans install?

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

You can give this a shot. The uninstaller should blow everything away under normal circumstances, but if you run into something that's corrupted, you might find that you can't delete it with the manual method.

Performing a Clean install of Flash Player on Windows:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/928315

_maria_

Legend

what operating system is this on?

Please go to https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html and click the Check Now buttonPost a screenshot of the resulting System Information

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