broken NPR player woes

December 12, 2008 2:55 AM

NPR's media player won't work on my Mac. Why?

I'm running Safari Version 3.2.1 (5525.27.1), OS X 10.5.5, and using the very very latest version of Flash player (which I just uninstalled and reinstalled according to Adobe's very careful instructions). The NPR player continues to stall out - it will load, show my item in the 'playlist' section and hang like it is buffering forever. This occurs only on the NPR site. Anyone else get this, or have any idea why I am?

posted by roygbv to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I have the same setup and it works fine.

I've found some Flash media players like this will sometimes not work for me. But if I open the same site in Firefox it will work. Then again, it sometimes won't work in Firefox but will work in Safari.

Try shutting down the browser and going back to the site.
posted by birdherder at 5:09 AM on December 12, 2008

You can also listen to NPR on any player that streams audio. I use RealPlayer and bookmarked NPR's stream, although I'm sure VLC or iTunes works just as well.
posted by Bearded Dave at 6:36 AM on December 12, 2008

Firefox has the same issue, strangely. I'm not sure how to go about selecting a single story feed in VLC, but that seems like the best solution.

This is what I'm trying to play.
posted by roygbv at 7:12 AM on December 12, 2008

It's working for me in Safari (same version/OS). Weird.
posted by doctor_negative at 8:08 AM on December 12, 2008

Next I'd try creating a new user account and seeing if it works there.
posted by 6550 at 11:25 AM on December 12, 2008

I had a problem playing NPR streams when I blocked certain advertisement IPs (via HOSTS file and Firefox add-ons). Once I allowed those ads to play, everything went smoothly.
posted by vaguelyweird at 11:44 AM on December 14, 2008

I have this same issue and it plagues my Safari, Firefox, and Camino. It's not caused by an ad blocker nor are there ports being blocked. Really really annoying.
posted by catcubed at 12:08 PM on April 2