Videos on metacafe.com don't play in Safari 4

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Level 1

105 points

Videos on metacafe.com don't play in Safari 4

I used to be able to play metacafe.com videos running OS 10.5.7 Leopard, but can no longer. I don't know when the problem occurred but I recently upgraded to Safari 4. I reinstalled the latest Adobe Flash Player plugin and it tests ok on the Adobe Flash Player test page. I don't know where else to find Flash Player videos to see if the problem is with the website or Safari 4 or my installation. I haven't noticed video playback problems on other websites, but I don't know if these are Flash video. Can anybody suggest another website that would have Flash video content to test this on?

BTW, the metacafe.com videos play ok running Safari 4 on a PowerBook using OS 10.4.11 Tiger.

iMac 2007 Intel Aluminum 2.4 GHz, Mac OS X (10.5.7), PowerBook G4 TI Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Jun 30, 2009 3:11 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 30, 2009 3:25 PM in response to i2

Hi

YouTube also plays Flash video. Can you play videos there?

The videos on Metacafe play fine on my machine.

Try this:

In the Finder, open Disk Utility found in your Applications>Utilities folder. Select your HD on the left, then "repair permissions".

When complete, in the Finder navigate to Your User Account>Library>Preferences>Macromedia>Flash Player>Shared Objects. Another folder with a unique name is next. Inside that folder, move to the trash the s.mcstatic.com and mcstatic.com folders.

Restart Safari.

Safari Menu>Reset Safari. Select "empty cache", then reset.

Last step: Safari Preferences>Security>Show Cookies. Enter metacafe in the spotlight panel, then remove the related cookies. Close the panel and try the site again.

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Answer 2

i2 Author

Level 1

105 points

Jun 30, 2009 7:05 PM in response to Hawaiian_Starman

Thanks for your reply. Yes the YouTube video plays fine. It turns out after I installed Safari 4, I got some error messages "you don't have the latest Flash Player or you don't have JavaScript enabled". I installed the latest Flash Player. After following your directions to the folder User Account/Library/Preferences/Flash Player I found only one TextEdit file "version.txt" in the folder-nothing else. When I opened the file the only text was "10.0.22.87". This is the version of the Flash Player update I installed. So I have concluded that the install did not put the Flash Player folder in correctly.

The good news is I finally had a chance to use Time Capsule to retrieve the original Flash Player folder with all the contents and restore it. It now works! In looking in the #SharedObjects folder there are a lot of subfolders with various names, mostly websites. Should these be cleaned out (trashed) periodically? Or is there a way to have the whole folder regenerated just as .plist files are when trashed?

Message was edited by: i2

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Answer 3

Jun 30, 2009 7:36 PM in response to i2

Hi

You're welcome. Glad to help.

That subfolder builds based on Flash sites you visit. The files work like browser cookies. You can clear out the subfolders as you wish. I suggest leaving alone those sites you often visit.

Great you had a Time Machine backup. I find it quite a useful tool when looking back in time for older files.

I maintain both a Time Machine backup and a bootable clone of my HD on two partitions of an external HD drive. The bootable clone (created using SuperDuper.) I update before any OS change requiring a computer restart. This way, if something goes awry I can easily restore the system to its earlier state. While Time Machine can also restore an entire HD, it doesn't do it as efficiently or quickly.

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