Known Participant

Question

Cannot play videos on IMDB or Rottentomatoes but can on Youtube.com

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
March 30, 2012
4 replies
20503 views

I have a desktop running XP(SP3), 3.0ghz intel cpu and 1.5gb RAM.

I use Chrome and IE8 browsers. I have DirectX SDK installed.

I have Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.228 installed which has been checked and tested to be OK on the Adobe site for BOTH browsers.

In case the flash player had been corrupted I have uninstalled and reinstalled Adobe flash many times with the Adobe uninstaller and with REVO.

For some reason I cannot playback videos using Adobe Flash on certain sites like IMDB and Rottentomatoes.com when the Adobe flash player has been integrated with JW and IVA players.

I can play all videos on YouTube and bbc.co.uk on BOTH browsers without any real issues.

In IE8:

A. when I try and play a trailer on RottenTomatoes.com, the playback window is blacked out with a small text field in the top left hand corner "Get Adobe Flash Player'. This is the same for every trailer on RottenTomatoes. The video playback here uses IVA player.

B. When I try and play the IMDB based trailers, playback is slowmo and jerky where the audio and video content are out of sync. The CPU is maxed out during this playback. When I try and play the video in a new tab, the playback window is blank/white and no playback occurs i.e. no flash player identified. IMBD uses JW player.

C. However when I play the test video at http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player it plays OK.

D. Trailers play OK in Lovefilm.com – CPU usage is normal

E. Trailers plays OK in digivers.com - CPU usage is normal

In GOOGLE Chrome:

A. when I try and play trailers in RottenTomatoes.com, the playback is in slowmo and jerky and video and audio are slightly out of sync. CPU usage is maxed out.

B. When I visit http://www.internetvideoarchive.com/IVA/Content and try and play the Muppet trailer, I see the same results. CPU usage is maxed out.

C. when I visit Lovefilm.com and play a trailer, playback is almost normal but still uses 100% CPU.

D. However when I visit Digivers.com who use IVA player with the Adobe Player, playback appears to be normal and CPU usage more or less normal.

I am not a internet/pc engineer but it would appear that IMDB are using a type of HTML5 player in some kind of combination with Adobe Flash Player. (?) I have identified the IMDB player as a JW Player (http://www.longtailvideo.com/ ).

I have spoken to IMDB and they say that it must be a local issue with my individual system configuration but I cannot understand the contradiction of being able to play flash videos on Youtube but not on IMDB or Rottentomatoes.com.

If it is a local issue, I wouldn't know where to look first. And if I need to download a MS update or some additional MS software, I wouldn't know what to look for.

I also have a laptop running i3 core and windows 7 but do not see this issue.

I would appreciate some feedback on this very annoying situation.

This topic has been closed for replies.

_maria_

Community Manager

Locking this topic due to its age. It's almost 8 years and rottentomatoes.com doesn't seem to require Flash Player anymore. Able to play/view a variety of videos without Flash Player installed.

Z

zeeshan_xt

Participant

I had exact same problem with IMDB videos and was able to resolve the issue. I had an ad-blocker add-on installed in firefox and was able to resolve the issue by excluding IMDB from my ad-blocker add-on. The videos started playing as soon as IMDB was excluded.

V

Veka2

Participant

Have to disagree with Xircal to post on Chrome forums. From here it looks like this is a bug in Adobe program and not browser related.

I have very similar proboblems with IMDB trailers with my old secondary PC in home. This is an old one I give you that.

-Dell Optiplex series 2,8ghz

-2gb memory

-running Win XP sp3 and perfecly updated

-for security running MS Security essentials and an outside hardware firewall

This machine is boosted up by replacing all HD´s exept of those used purely for storage with fast SSD ones and its cleaned up of garbage XP makes continually. Disks, registry etc plus there are some tweaks to boost an old XP added.

Difference is that I use Opera 11.60 but still experience very annoying jagging and out of sync voice on IMDB videos. Actually they are useless.

When Flash plug-in starts I see a whopping jump of CPU usage by Opera from 20-30% to 90-99%

I say this is a bug in Adobe Plash player and nothing else.

A

Anonymous

Veka2 wrote:
Have to disagree with Xircal to post on Chrome forums. From here it looks like this is a bug in Adobe program and not browser related.

You see, the problem with that argument is why isn't everybody experiencing this problem if it's as widespread as you say it is?

Please at least check these solutions to see if any of them applies to you: http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=table.cs&topic=14684&from=14684&rd=1

S

surfing69Author

Known Participant

LOL I´m a male. Veka is an old Finnish nickname meaning about the same thing as ´bro´ ´brotha´ or ´dude´ in American English.

Slight corrrection again Xircal. I´m using Opera and never Chrome. This is more close to FF as it uses FF/Mozilla plugin in VLC player.

Sadly there is a point there when you mentioned our CPU age. Its true that these machines just dont have the power to handle HD video. Actually my mobile phone (Qualcomm 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU) or my TV can handle HD video better then this PC. IMHO the CPU speed is not really the issue but both my phone and TV actually have another prosessor to handle graphics including video.

Weird thing is that I can still watch HD videos from YouTube or even full 1080p (Matroska .mkv or Nikon .mov) videos using VLC player with this PC so flash pleyer is maybe still wasting some CPU time. Just saying it does not perform as good as straight stand alone media players.

@surfing69

For me IMDB serves 480 video if available as a default. Hover your mouse in right upper corner and you see a quality menu. Choose "Standard" it might help little bit on jagging but for me its still not pretty to watch.

ED it: Tried IMDB trailer by IE8 browser. That was really bad like watching a bad stop motion clip and sound was off about 1,5-2 seconds.

Yes I agree this is all very strange. I have no problem with playing vids on VLC or other stand alone players.

Changing the settings from 480 to standard in IMDB doesnt help at all. When I went to Youtube I found that I had relatively no problems playing the standard res vids at 360p but began to see perfomance issues if i selected 480p and it became much worse (similar to what I am seeing with IMDB0 when I selected 780 HD res.

I am comimg to the conclusion that the problem with viewing these types of video has to be hardware related and requies an upgrade (unfortunatley means dipping in to my pocket)

Thanks for everyone's input.

A

Anonymous

Are you still experiencing the same problem?

There appears to be a bug in Firefox which may also affect other browsers where it concerns IMDB. Steps to reproduce in Firefox are as follows:

Visit http://www.imdb.com/features/video/trailers/ and play a trailer.
Exit IMDB and then install a Firefox Add-on.
Reload the IMDB site and videos on the same link will no longer play. Neither will any controls be visible.

I tested it myself today and found that restarting in Firefox 'Safe Mode' allowed the content to play, but it's unlikely to be an add-on issue since trailers played correctly before I installed an additional add-on. The bug is documented here: IMDB videos fail after installing Firefox Add-on

If the problem is still ongoing with you, could you try restarting Google Chrome in Incognito Mode to see if it makes any difference?

S

surfing69Author

Known Participant

thank you for your comments. However I am still seeing the same issues.

Setting Google Chrome to incognito showed no change i.e. no improvement for both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

If there is something in my system that could be interfering with playback on these 2 website and not on Youtube, would you know how to trouble shoot it?

In regard to IE8, I found that I had set 'Compatibility View' settings for ALL websites. When I unchecked this option, I found that Rottentomatoes could now see Adobe Flash Player and I was able to playback trailers to a fashion. However the issue of playback on IMBD remained regardess of compatibility settings.

I havent tested Firefox but would anticipate that there would be no change.

I just cant understand why I can playback videos on BBC.co.uk, YouTube, Didivers and other sites that use Adobe flash player but NOT on IMDB and RT. Are they using a modified player platform? What are the JW and IVA players and what is their relationship with the Adobe Flash player?

A

Anonymous

In my particular case, the problem was caused by a privacy add-on called "Disconnect". It seems that when you land on certain sites, data is relayed to Google via a widget. On IMDB, that widget was being blocked by "Disconnect". More info on concerning the add-on can be found here: https://disconnect.me/tools By unblocking it and then refreshing the page, the video played normally.

There appears to be a privacy issue with this forum even because I have "Disconnect" enabled at this moment and the widget which would normally relay what I'm doing here to Google is being blocked. In that respect, whenever the Google widget is blocked, "Disconnect" displays a "G" icon in the Firefox location bar. Clicking it allows me to unblock it if I want to. See screenshot.

This doesn't help you any though since you don't have Firefox installed. Maybe you could consider installing it to see if it makes any difference. As I say, IMDB works just fine without the privacy tool enabled. I don't have any problems on Rottentomatoes either incidentally. Here's the download link to Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/

Do you have any security software installed like McAfee Site Advisor, or AVG Safe Search? These type of scanners can interfere with video playback as well.

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