Make the music continue playing please

August 7, 2007 10:47 AM

Flash Player 9, running in Firefox pauses when it senses that it is no longer on screen. Please make it stop doing this so that I can listen to music (and videos) in the background.

Say I have a video playing on youtube. When I switch from the video's tab (this is in Firefox 2.0.0.6) to another tab, or switch to another window, the video stops playing until I return to that tab. It happen on sites other than youtube as well (including the wonderful Mefi Music). This is incredibly undesirable. I'm using Flash 9, on a relatively vanilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 install (it has tabmixplus installed, and something from Evernote note clipper.) OS is Windows XP SP 2.

Also, I apologize in advance if this is easily googleable. I did try, but could not conjure the right words.

posted by !Jim to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I want to add that I've had this problem as well, on an identical setup. However - sometimes it's not dependent on their being one tab open. Sometimes, like on MeFi Music, if I only have one tab open, and I scroll down so that the player dissapears, the music stops.

And then, of course, there are times where I have multiple tabs open, and this doesn't happen. I haven't been able to discern a pattern, and it drives me crazy.
posted by thewittyname at 10:58 AM on August 7, 2007

For me it appears to happen anytime the player isn't on screen. If I scroll down past the video to the comments, the movie stops playing.
posted by !Jim at 11:00 AM on August 7, 2007

I had this exact problem for awhile, and it seemed to stop on it's own. This was a few months ago.
posted by Martin E. at 12:17 PM on August 7, 2007

I've noticed this at times as well - usually when I have a alot of Firefox tabs open.

My guess is that when Firefox is low on system resources, it lowers the priority for things it thinks you are no longer really using - such as flash that isn't on screen.

A couple of suggestions:
- restart Firefox (completely close all windows and tabs and relaunch)
- close any other memory intensive programs you might be using.
- use IE or Opera for your background entertainment.
posted by ghostmanonsecond at 2:53 PM on August 7, 2007