Vimeo for technophobes?

February 4, 2015 10:20 AM

I'm using an up-to-date 2-year-old MacBook Air and I just can't manage to get Vimeo videos to load. Can someone help me fix this by speaking to me as if I am your elderly aunt's even older senile neighbor?

It's not my wifi -- I can stream plenty of other stuff. YouTube is fine. Vimeo is fine on my phone. On the laptop, I can't even do the "pause it and let it pre-load" thing -- it just. Won't. Load.

Why? And how to fix this?

posted by BlahLaLa to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Have you tried multiple different browsers?
posted by jozxyqk at 10:48 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Here's a few troubleshooting steps to try to isolate where/when it happens.

1. Do you have more than one browser on your computer? Like Safari and Chrome for example? Would it be possible for you to try the video on both of them and see if the same thing happens? Safari uses an HTML5 player and Firefox uses a Flash player. If you can use one and not the other, which one? (more info)

2. Is this for embedded videos (i.e. on another web page) or straight from Vimeo.com? Can you give us a link to a sample video?

3. Is Flash working properly? You can check and troubleshoot on this page.

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html

4. Is it possible you changed a setting at one point that changed the settings for how Flash works? You can go to this page if you use Firefox

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html

and if you click on the fifth tab (with the big eye on it) and see if there is an entry in the list below for Vimeo. You might want to try this for the tab after that as well.
posted by jessamyn at 10:53 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Clear your cache if you haven't already. I had the same issue recently and that fixed it for me.
posted by Hermione Granger at 10:54 AM on February 4, 2015

Response by poster: I only have Safari. I am directly linking to Vimeo. Here's an example of one that plays fine on my phone but not at all on the laptop.

Clearing the cache did not work.
posted by BlahLaLa at 11:03 AM on February 4, 2015

OK. I am able to play that video using Safari 8.0.2

- Do you have an updated (current) version of Safari? Which version are you using?
- Are you using Private Browsing? (this would be a thing you'd have to turn on, it's unlikely you are doing it by accident)
- Under the Safari menu, if you go to Extensions, do you have anything in that section?
posted by jessamyn at 11:29 AM on February 4, 2015

Standard questions that must be asked:

1. When was the last time you rebooted your computer? If not recently, try that first.
2. When did this problem start? Recently, or it's always been there as far as you know?
posted by tempestuoso at 11:38 AM on February 4, 2015

Response by poster: -- I'm using Safara 8.0.3
-- not using private browsing
-- extensions -- yes! AdBlock, one that cleans up YouTube, one that cleans up Facebook, one that cleans up IMDB. But turning extensions off doesn't solve the Vimeo problem.
-- rebooted yesterday
-- this has been a problem for months

Thank you so much for the continued help!
posted by BlahLaLa at 11:38 AM on February 4, 2015

Based on this it sounds like Ad-Block may be the problem. Does anything on that page help?
posted by tempestuoso at 11:42 AM on February 4, 2015

Whoops, wrong Ad-Block. Although it sounds like Safari AdBlock also has similar problems for other people.
posted by tempestuoso at 11:45 AM on February 4, 2015

Response by poster: (Just to clarify, the problem persisted once I turned off all extensions.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 11:50 AM on February 4, 2015

The thing that always seems to fix the "I've tried everything and it still doesn't work" situations for me: Allow cookies. Or whitelist them or whatever.

I'm pretty sure Vimeo was one of those situations, too.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:59 AM on February 4, 2015

This may also be of help. Just to see if you can get the problem to go away at all, you might consider adding a new user, logging in as that, and launching Safari as that user (this is suggested in the comments in that link). Then that would start up a vanilla Safari. If it worked then, it means the problem is something unique to the set-up for your main account that you use to log into your computer.
posted by tempestuoso at 12:04 PM on February 4, 2015

That thread also mentions repairing permissions. This is a straightforward thing to try.

Launch a program called Disk Utility (which should live in your Utility folder so from the Finder you can go to the Go menu and Select Utilities). When it's running click on the hard drive on the left (you'll see two probably, the main one and then the one indented under the main one, choose the second one) and then click "repair disk permissions" and let it run. A lot of stuff may scroll by the window while it's running. This is normal.

After it's done, try restarting Safari again and see if that matters.

This Apple support document talks about how to can set up a new user account (or use a test account) for the purposes of troubleshooting
posted by jessamyn at 1:41 PM on February 4, 2015

Have you contacted Vimeo's support team? They are great folks who will try to help.
posted by thirdletter at 5:02 PM on February 4, 2015

Response by poster: I accidentally marked this resolved, so just want to add that I suck, but since there wasn't an easy solution, I just never tried the more involved stuff. I have too much going on in my life. Oh well!
posted by BlahLaLa at 4:44 PM on March 11, 2015