stuck! (firefox/wmv/flip4mac/vlc)

[guitarplaya08]

hello. i am having trouble playing videos in firefox. whenever i try to play a video it says "needs plugin" but u cannot install one. i have flip4mac installed and windows media player and VLC and the VLC intel firefox/safari plugin and i cannot get video to play.

(for example comegetyousome.com has a ton of videos and none of them will play. cnn videos will not play in firefox or safari)


at least in safari the player will show (for comegetyousome.com), but the video will still not play!!

i'm stumpted, i've looked all over the internet and i cannot find anything, your help would be GREATLY appreciated..

thanks in advance

 

[clevin]

i have no problem here, quicktime jumps out and starts to play.
try establish a new profile for firefox, see if that solve anything

 

[72930]

Repair permissions
My answer to everything I'm not really sure about

 

[guitarplaya08]

sorry i've been a pc user all my life and i just switched.

i cannot figure out how to make a new profile or repair permissions

i found this on creating a new profile:

On Linux or Mac, start Firefox with the -ProfileManager switch, e.g. ./firefox -ProfileManager (this assumes that you're in the firefox directory)


but i don't understand how to do that.. (whats the profilemanager switch?)

also i looked through all of firefox's options to "repair permissions" and again i couldnt find anything.

thanks again, i love my new macbookpro its just this whole video thing is frustrating me

 

[mkrishnan]

Read this.

The links explain lots of basic Mac troubleshooting techniques and how to do them.

Wait, let me ask a dumb question....

Do you have Adobe FLASH installed?

Sites such as YouTube, Google Video, and so on, do not use WMV. They use Flash.

EDIT: Sorry, I see the come get you some is indeed non-Flash video.

I think you may possibly be having trouble purely because you've installed three different plug-ins that are all for the same thing one on top of the other....

I would recommend going into /library/internet plug-ins and deleting all except one of them. And then re-installing that one, possibly. I'd suggest F4M of those three.

 

[clevin]

sorry i've been a pc user all my life and i just switched.

i cannot figure out how to make a new profile or repair permissions

i found this on creating a new profile:

On Linux or Mac, start Firefox with the -ProfileManager switch, e.g. ./firefox -ProfileManager (this assumes that you're in the firefox directory)


but i don't understand how to do that.. (whats the profilemanager switch?)

also i looked through all of firefox's options to "repair permissions" and again i couldnt find anything.

thanks again, i love my new macbookpro its just this whole video thing is frustrating me

hehe,
1. close firefox,
2. goto username/library/application support/firefox
3. to be safe, just rename that firefox folder to a different one, such as "firefox2", so u can safely get it back if new profile won't solve anything
4. restart firefox, it will automatically re-establish a profile called "firefox" at that location

hopefully this will solve any issue related to firefox, if not, then its probably not firefox's problem

Note: by doing so, u will lose all your bookmatks, passwords, extensions and themes. (they are still in "firefox2" folder), post back if above steps solve that problem, and you want to migrate your boomark and password to your new profile.

 

[guitarplaya08]

sweet. so i got flip4mac to work and i can watch videos in firefox.

sry but one more question. in windows media player you can fast forward to any point of the video clip and it will "buffer" and you can start watching. but with flip4mac you have to wait for the whole video to finish loading before you can jump around to any point in the video.

is there any way to let flip4mac buffer?

(this is especially useful when large large full length video clips are being loaded.)

 

[guitarplaya08]

or instead of using Flip4mac, which runs through quicktime.. since i have WMP, is there a plugin for safari/firefox.

i have not been able to find one but if someone has one or knows where to find one please let me know

(again for the buffering reason)

 

[3CCD]

Thats odd. Everything works well for me. I love Firefox, much better than Safari.

 

[mkrishnan]

sry but one more question. in windows media player you can fast forward to any point of the video clip and it will "buffer" and you can start watching. but with flip4mac you have to wait for the whole video to finish loading before you can jump around to any point in the video.

If I understand you correctly, there are two different kinds of video content...

1) There is video that is sent as video *files* -- avi, mp4, mov, etc, etc. These files are still sequential, and the video players are designed to be able to start playing them before they finish downloading them. As far as I know, no video player will let you skip to a point you have not yet loaded in these files.

2) There are streams. A stream means that, rather than sending you a video file, it just sends it to you bit by bit. The recipient is not intended to keep the final file -- and no mov / mp4 / avi / etc is created on the client computer. As far as I know, streams will let you skip to an arbitrary point on any computer.

So I'm not sure, but I think what's happening is that you're not looking at streams, and this is why you have this effect....

 

[Mechcozmo]

or instead of using Flip4mac, which runs through quicktime.. since i have WMP, is there a plugin for safari/firefox.

i have not been able to find one but if someone has one or knows where to find one please let me know

(again for the buffering reason)

No.
Windows Media Player has been left to die a long, protracted, death on OS X.
Flip4Mac is your best bet to play WMV formatted stuff.