Unable to play Flash on youtube

August 12, 2006 9:46 PM

I am unable to play any videos on youtube. It tells me to download the latest Flash player, but when I do it just keeps repeating the same message. I have XP2 with IE7 beta, only using windows firewall, and security settings at default. Any ideas why?
posted by blue shadows to computers & internet (10 comments total)

You're using a beta version of IE?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:47 PM on August 12, 2006

You probably need to be logged in as administrator in order to install the Flash player update.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:52 PM on August 12, 2006

Install the hotfix .. www.getfirefox.com
posted by SirStan at 10:16 PM on August 12, 2006

Did you restart IE after installing Flash?
posted by jchgf at 10:27 PM on August 12, 2006

I logged in as admin, restarted IE, restarted the computer, downloaded the full Flash file from Adobe, but still nothing works.
posted by blue shadows at 11:48 PM on August 12, 2006

There are two versions of the Flash plugin, one is an ActiveX component and is used in IE, the other is a Firefox/Netscape/et al plugin. You can easily install one without the other. Make sure you're not downloading the wrong one. I think that adobe's page tries to direct you to the right one based on your user-agent.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:01 AM on August 13, 2006

Do note that you're using beta software. Just this past week, I was trying to troubleshoot a problem a user was having with FTP sites in IE7 beta. Trying to visit an FTP site would show an error message much like a DNS server failure had occurred, but there was no DNS problem. I couldn't really do much of anything to fix it, and ended up installing a standalone FTP client.

You may want to go back to a stable version of IE.
posted by odinsdream at 8:47 AM on August 13, 2006

You say this like it's a bad thing.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:02 AM on August 13, 2006

I just downloaded Firefox and I still get the same message.
posted by blue shadows at 1:38 PM on August 13, 2006

I just managed to get it to work in IE by first uninstalling Flash using the tool found on http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/alternates/ and then reinstalling it from the same page.
posted by blue shadows at 1:54 PM on August 13, 2006