YouTube will not play in Firefox or Chrome on fresh 12.04 install

Question

First of all let me state I am new to Ubuntu and the Linux platform all together. I decided to install on an older PC (Pentium 3) to get some use out of it. Everything seems to have installed fine (Ubuntu 12.04).

1. Immediately went to test the Firefox and it would not play YouTube videos. All I got was a black screen. Checked, it had Shockwave plug-in installed and up to date.

2. So I downloaded Chrome knowing Flash is integrated into Chrome. I got the messag:

   could not load Shock wave Flash

   on the home page.

3. I downloaded ubuntu-restricted-.... Still won't work

Please help.

Solution 1

You can try html5 to watch youtube videos instead of flash, just type http://youtube.com/html5 and choose enter html5 trial, it uses html5 for video instead of flash player.

Solution 2

I had the same problem and to solve it I just entered:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Resart firefox and the youtube site works again...

Solution 3

I had a similar problem on my 12.04 VM.

From terminal, I followed Eliah Kagen's advice from this question, and I entered the following:

dpkg -l | egrep 'flash|gnash|swf|spark'

And nothing was returned. Following steps given in this Adobe forum post, I entered:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

After that, I restarted Firefox and tried to load the same video...

Comments

[Jesse]

I think dpkg -l doesn't need root permissions. Nice answer, though

[Aaron]

@Jesse, you're right it doesn't! Since it deals with package management, I just assumed that it would.

[user147000]

Just to update. Got back home and tried the terminal commands. WORKED LIKE A BIG DOG!!! Thanks again!!

[Marc Vanhoomissen]

Could you specify for which Ubuntu version you tried ?