Most videos will play... some will not.

(I am not sure which forum to ask this question so I put it here in General. Feel free to move it, Mr. Mod)

I have an odd, site-specific flash video problem. On a handful of sites, videos will not play. They work fine on YouTube, Live Leak, Hulu, etc. They work fine embedded in most news sites and blogs. They don't work on ESPN, where all I can see is a blank black box.

• At first I thought it was a browser issue (Firefox), so I uninstalled/reinstalled Flash. No go.
• I then reset flash settings to default. No help.
• I toggled hardware acceleration. Nope.
• I then uninstalled Ghostery. No go.
• I disabled Ad Block Plus. Nope.
• I ran Firefox with add-ons disabled. Still nothing.
• I allowed third-party cookies. Nada.
• I changed dom.ipc.plugins. No good.

I began to suspect it wasn't the browser. I opened IE and tried that... still no videos on ESPN. Just a black box. So my attention turned to my ISP or modem. I fired up my laptop. Lo and behold, the videos on ESPN played fine... so I guess it's not the modem or ISP, it's an issue with my Desktop.

I thought I would check out ABC News (they are a business partner of ESPN and might use similar video technology) and I got a clue -- the videos would play, but flashed an error message first. It read:

Error saving localized settings
Application is unable to access your file system

So I turned to a more generalized, whole-PC approach.

• First I updated my graphics drivers. No go.
• I reset my Hosts file. Nope.
• I reset the permissions of Macromedia folder with subinacl and a bat file. No good.

Then I set up a new Win 7 user account and tried to view ESPN videos in there. They worked fine!

So that is my problem. Something in my Win 7 admin account is screwed up, but I don't quite know what. A corrupted AppData folder? A permissions issue? Something else entirely?

Hi stevieray,

You may want to try using the system in 'Safe Mode' to see what happens. Since the 'new user account' works fine, the 'flash player version' appears to be apt; however I would still check the current version and look for an update. You may even try re-installing the 'flash player'.

A corrupt firewall may also be instrumental; try to temporarily disable the firewall and check results. If it produces positive results, re-install the 'anti-virus/firewall'.

You may also try SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker and try isolating the culprit.

Hi stevieray,

Thank you for the reply.

Apologies; tried but was was unable to find the failures. You may want to use a 'New Account' if nothing else works.

stevieray said:

Thanks for the answers, guys. I updated the flash player for both FF and IE only two days ago, ran SFC /SCANNOW and did a Repair Install less than a week ago. I hadn't tried the firewall yet (Win 7 built-in firewall) so I tried that. Didn't help.

I just tried manually resetting all of the permissions for appdata (icacls * /t /c /reset). It restored 66,000+ files to default, but it failed to find and/or restore nearly 10,000. I'd like to see which files failed. Does anyone know how to get the icacls function to list only the failures? And maybe even save that list for me?

Perhaps you're looking in the wrong place, or applying unnecessary fixes. If something in the AppData folder is the problem, then a complete clean re-install of Firefox might do the trick.

EDIT: Ah, there we go, you beat me to it lol

Hi stevieray,

Glad that the issue is fixed :)