Youtube videos do not play in Firefox, Win XP

[soldar]

I have half dozen computers running Win XP Pro SP3 and Firefox ESR 52.9.0 (32 bit).  In all except one Firefox displays and plays embedded videos just fine but on this other one I just see white space, no video. Clicking there does nothing.

I am guessing it should be a matter of configuration.

Any ideas?

[JxR]

You could try turning off hardware acceleration in Firefox's options and see if that fixes it.  If it does, then you could look into the video card drivers.  There are addons that force things like h.264 encoding for Youtube as well, if the card supports it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

[soldar]

Thanks, tried it, no difference.

ETA: After more than a year if not being able to see YouTube embedded in Firefox and having asked in several forums and having spent time trying to resolve it ... finally, I tried once again and by sheer luck figured it out. It is something extremely simple and I am surprised some forums out there could not figure it out.

I right clicked on the blank area and "inspect element" and started looking around and saw the <iframe> etc and then a warning that it had been blocked because "tracking protection is enabled".  Disabling tracking protection fixed the issue.

I guess YouTube can track me if I am at their site but if they are sending the video "abroad" they want to track it too.

I had tried to fix this many times without success and now found the way by chance. If at first you don't succeed, try again.

[JxR]

Cool!  Never rule out just doing a OS refresh if your not getting anywhere (if your keeping stuff backed up and can restore what you need easily).  Years working in IT reinforced for me that it is very easy to waste hours troubleshooting obscure issues, when a ~2-3hr refresh would have produced the same result (especially when only a single client is acting up).  Obviously this advice is mostly just applicable to desktops and not servers.

I'm sure you must have a special need for keeping XP boxes alive and running an older ESR of Firefox...that said, just be careful keeping boxes like this hooked to the internet.  Not only are they vulnerable, but can be an used as an attack vector into other parts of your network.

[soldar]

One reason I like to have all machines configured alike is that it helps when one has a problem to compare configurations, exchange hardware etc. It has helped me a lot.

I probably could have resolved this issue just by comparing Firefox configurations.

I have another issue with this computer not playing AC3/AAC audio even though the others do. I will open a thread and see if I get lucky because it is a pain having to use another computer.

[JxR]

One reason I like to have all machines configured alike is that it helps when one has a problem to compare configurations, exchange hardware etc.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to get a single one setup exactly how you want, then make yourself a master image setup for unattended install.  Really weird issue pops up, nuke it and re-image.  In your situation this is even easier to maintain since the two piece of software you mention: XP, Firefox will not receive any updates.

[soldar]

Yeah, no, not worth it at this point and the Win XP machines software are set up as close as possible but with respect to hardware they are all different. About six laptops and maybe ten desktops (plus some Linux desktops). The good thing is that if and when one machine fails or has a problem I can just go to another machine which is set up pretty much the same. But, as I say, it is strange that these quirks come up where one machine behaves differently.

In this case I was pretty sure it was some Firefox configuration setting but nobody could tell me where to look.

Anyway, it is good that it is working now and I can see videos again.