Silverlight broke YouTube

March 13, 2011 7:37 PM

Microsoft Silverlight breaks YouTube and/or Flash?

I'm working on a computer for a friend, and she installed Silverlight recently and it's broken her ability to view YouTube videos in the page.

Videos will play in the popout window, but not in the main browser window. Audio plays in the browser window, but not video.

I've uninstalled Silverlight, uninstalled Flash and reinstalled it and still no go.

Forums and search on the internet aren't helping much either because of the amount of astroturfing for Silverlight.

Any suggestions?

posted by loquacious to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Is the problem the same across different browsers? What browser(s) is this happening in? What happens if you manually disable the silverlight plug-in via the browser settings?
posted by stresstwig at 7:47 PM on March 13, 2011

Browser and OS info might be helpful, but Silverlight is probably a red herring in this issue. Adblock? Flashblock? Cleared cache and cookies? Javascript on? Flash settings? Run through the YouTube help file?
posted by sageleaf at 7:52 PM on March 13, 2011

Yeah, first thing I would try is different browsers.
posted by empath at 7:55 PM on March 13, 2011

How old is her computer? I work in tech support and I had a customer with this exact issue. Turning off hardware acceleration in Flash (right-click on a Flash video and hit Settings, then click on the icons at the bottom) fixed it right up. It seems that some old video cards fuck right off when dealing with updated versions of Flash. You might also want to try updating the video card drivers.
posted by calistasm at 8:03 PM on March 13, 2011

Thanks calistasm, that did it!
posted by loquacious at 11:22 PM on March 13, 2011

Seconding updating the video drivers. Hardware acceleration in Flash is going to mean the difference between a choppy video and a smooth video. You really shouldn't shut it off. Typically, the video driver is at fault here.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:42 AM on March 14, 2011

Well, the video drivers aren't the only issue necessarily. Stage video in Flash (recently released by Adobe, and we turned it on in the YouTube player recently as well) doesn't play well with some cards. Obviously something that is being worked on, but if the drivers are up to date and this kind of thing keeps happening then disabling HW acceleration is the answer.
posted by wildcrdj at 9:39 AM on March 14, 2011