What in the actual heck is the story with Flash?

[2muchcoffeeman]

Full system info can be found in my profile.

Flash may be among the most-discussed issues in this forum. There are too many threads to read all of them, but in reading a good number of them, this is my understanding of the situation:

1. Chrome/Chromium no longer supports Flash
2. Firefox DOES support Flash, but is "taking steps to reduce the need for Flash content in everyday browsing."
3. This "Flash blindness" can be cured by installing plugins into Chromium and Firefox and Flash players into the system

This would appear to be a straightforward remedy: Find and install the necessary plugins. Yet mysteries remain.

Here is a web page with some pretty interesting science news, presented in Flash. On my Windows system on a Chrome browser, this Flash content loads and plays without complaint. I presume this is because my Win10 installation of Chrome has the necessary plugin:



. . . which matches the current version of Adobe Flash.

Loading that same link on my Kubuntu 16.04/Chromium (53.0.2785.143) setup, however, I get this:



In my Kunbuntu/Chromium plugins page, this is the version of the plugin it shows:



Version 11.2 is the most recent version of Flash to target Linux, according to this forum post. It would appear my Chromium Flash plugin is up to snuff. So, Flash content should play, right?

But no.

Over in Firefox (50.0), the problem is similar. Loading the same page that I linked above, this is the result:



I can't upload any more images in this post, but I can report that the Firefox Add-ons Manager page shows that Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 and Shockwave Flash 13.1 r2 are enabled.

Do I have the necessary Flash players installed? I think so:

For Chromium...

[sudo] password for abcdefg: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
[HL]flashplugin-installer is already the newest version (11.2.202.644ubuntu0.16.04.1)[/HL].
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 32 not upgraded.

abcd@abcd-Dell-System-XPS-L321X:/usr/lib/flashplugin-installer$ ls
install_plugin  [HL]libflashplayer.so[/HL]

. . .and for Firefox:

abcd@abcd-Dell-System-XPS-L321X:/usr/lib/browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash$ ls
[HL]libfreshwrapper-flashplayer.so[/HL]

So I've looked under the hood everywhere I can determine needs to be examined. If there is a shortcoming in my configurations/installations, or a mismatch of one component or another, I can't identify it. From what I can discern reading these forums, "Flash blindness" in Linux/Kubuntu/Chromium can be cured, and rather simply. But darned if I can replicate the solution.

[vinnywright]

hummm @hear I can view the content on that page with google-chrome browser but not firefox or qupzilla

VINNY

[claydoh]

I have flash explicitly disabled in Chrome and the video still played for me, here on my chromebook at the moment, so the player the website uses is providing both flash and html5 playback , which is becoming more common as websites and the embedded players they use move away from Flash

[Rod J]

The video also played fine here in Firefox 50.0.2 and I have never installed Flash in this browser. Interestingly, when I right mouse click on the video it reports as "Powered by JW Player 7.6.0". Clicking on that message shows this page. I guess it's playing in HTLM5.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Okay.

Using the same video source, we have established that while it does not play on my setup, it does play on others' setups.

The questions, then, are why? and how can I fix it? I have tried to share as much specific information as I can, as is expected of forum participants. Is there any further information I can provide? Is there anything to be done? Or do I just satisfy myself with cursing the Linux gods on this one and just deal with not being able to view Flash content on my Kubutnu rig?

[GreyGeek]

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/pr...x/fix-problems

[vinnywright]

in my case it was the add blocker in firefox that was preventing the vid player to load ,,,,,,,I disabled "uBlockOrigin" for the domain and it plays now

VINNY

[Qqmike]

I'm using 14.04, but both my Chromium and Firefox 50.0.2 play that vid with just the standard plugins you are listing. (In Firefox, of course, I had to "allow" everything in my overly-protective NoScript (add-on) dropdown list.)

[dibl]

Chrome Ver. 52.x on Debian runs the video as HTML5. Numerous hits in my search for "chrome default to html5" indicate that this google announcement has in fact been implemented.

I wonder whether the browser itself may not be your culprit, even though the error message appears to blame it. I would be testing and verifying video drivers and multimedia packages -- maybe using VLC to test various video formats and things like that, before spending more time on browsers and plugins.

[2muchcoffeeman]

So, an update with a happy ending. Flash video is now working both in Chromium and Firefox.

To retrace all my steps, I started in Firefox. I loaded this page again. And once again I got this error message:



It basically is saying, "You don't have libpepflashplayer.so on your system."

But that seemed wrong. Yes, I do, I thought. Here:

user@user-Dell-System-XPS-L321X:/usr/lib/flashplugin-installer$ ls
install_plugin  [HL]libflashplayer.so[/HL]

Then I went back through all of the pieces of evidence. Going back to the chrome://plugins tab in Chromium, I checked out the flash plugin again:



And this time I noticed something was a bit off. Check out the pathname shown in the chrome://plugins tab:

/usr/lib/[HL]pepperflashplugin-nonfree[/HL]/libpepflashplayer.so

. . . and compare that to the actual place where the .so file was located:

user@user-Dell-System-XPS-L321X:/usr/lib/[HL]flashplugin-installer[/HL]$ ls
install_plugin  libflashplayer.so

So, I had the player. It was just in the wrong place. To confirm, I looked inside the directory specified in the chrome://plugins tab:

user@user-Dell-System-XPS-L321X:/usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree$ ls
pubkey-google.txt

The .so file was not in the directory where Chrome expected it to be.

I could have just moved the .so file that was already on the system from its incorrect location to /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree, but that didn't occur to me until later. Instead, I grabbed a fresh 32-bit package directly from Adobe (because my system is 32-bit):



I downloaded to the /home directory, extracted it there so that I could easily find the needed .so file and thus determine its path name (I'm spelling out all of this for the benefit of all the other New Guys --- like me -- who often are in the dark about how to do these kind of necessary but often insufficiently explained preparatory maneuvers). With a bead on the location of the newly downloaded .so file, I was able to simply move it to the directory where Chrome needed it to be:

user@user-Dell-System-XPS-L321X:/home$ sudo cp /home/user/flash_player_ppapi_linux.i386/libpepflashplayer.so /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree

Then I verified that the .so file had indeed been placed into the /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree directory:

user@user-Dell-System-XPS-L321X:/usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree$ ls
[HL]libpepflashplayer.so[/HL]  pubkey-google.txt

Then I restarted Chrome and tried the link to the video again. Worked perfectly. Firefox, too.

What remains a mystery is how the .so file got removed from /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree in the first place. Oh well.

So, the answer to my original question What in the actual heck is the story with Flash? is this: The necessary plugin was installed in the wrong directory. Check your browsers for the location they need the plug-in to be placed, and then inspect your filesystem to make sure the plugin is in that location. If not, find where it is ($ locate libpepflahplayer.so) and then move it.

[Snowhog]

You could also have just created in a simlink in the required directory that pointed to where the actual file was.

Good troubleshooting though.

[2muchcoffeeman]

You're right . . . if I knew what a simlink is. Guess I'll go look it up!

[vinnywright]

You're right . . . if I knew what a simlink is. Guess I'll go look it up!

a system link is a kind of virtual file or directory that points the actual location of that file or directory .

I use these to keep my personal data in a storage drive but all programs can just use their default save download whatever directory in my /home/vinny

vinny@vinny-Bonobo-Extreme:~$ ls -la
total 19552

lrwxrwxrwx  1 vinny vinny       34 Mar 19  2016 Calibre Library -> /mnt/btrfs/kubuntu/Calibre Library

lrwxrwxrwx  1 vinny vinny       28 Mar 19  2016 Documents -> /mnt/btrfs/kubuntu/Documents
lrwxrwxrwx  1 vinny vinny       28 Mar 19  2016 Downloads -> /mnt/btrfs/kubuntu/Downloads

lrwxrwxrwx  1 vinny vinny       27 Mar 19  2016 dwhelper -> /mnt/btrfs/kubuntu/dwhelper

lrwxrwxrwx  1 vinny vinny       24 Mar 19  2016 Music -> /mnt/btrfs/kubuntu/Music

lrwxrwxrwx  1 vinny vinny       27 Mar 19  2016 Pictures -> /mnt/btrfs/kubuntu/Pictures

lrwxrwxrwx  1 vinny vinny       25 Mar 19  2016 Videos -> /mnt/btrfs/kubuntu/Videos

every thing else but these links were removed from the ls output for ease of seeing them

this is the same in all 5 of the OS's I have on this box .

VINNY

[wizard10000]

a system link is a kind of virtual file or directory that points the actual location of that file or directory.

symlink stands for "symbolic link"

In Windows terms this would be thought of as a shortcut; most gooey file managers have some way to make one, but what they do is

ln -s /path/to/real/file /path/where/you/want/the/shortcut/to/go

and relative paths work just fine. For example, I have one that links kdesu so that it's in my path, which makes things easier for me. What I did was (as root):

ln -s /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/kdesu  /usr/bin/kdesu

and since I keep my music on an external hard drive,

ln -s /mnt/external/Music /home/wizard/Music

symlinks are actually kinda handy

[vinnywright]

symlink stands for "symbolic link"

yes I know that ,,,,,,,,,,,I guess I was describing the way I see them ,,,,,,,,,,,you see a folder in dolphin in your /home (or where ever) but it really is not hear but over their ,,,,,,,so "virtual"

:P

VINNY