Thursday, February 21, 2008

Help!

I got a bug in my machine.

A few days ago Youtube stopped working on my XP. The videos seem to load. They play for a few seconds and then stop. I don't get any sound.

I can't recall if I did anything unusual to make it happen.

I'm using the latest Netscape version (9.0.0.6 I believe).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Update: I reloaded Flash (after reloading IE to no effect) and that fixed it.

Further Update: It is broken again.

5 comments:

linearthinker said...

My bet is on corrupted scripts.

Be thankful that when you encounter a site where YouTube loads automatically, and in doing so, triggers the bad script, that your CPU doesn't go to 100% and slow your system to a crawl.

The good news is that there's life without YouTube.

Anonymous said...

switch to ubuntu dude

Paul said...

I know I'm coming late to this, but...

I've had the same problem. In fact, I've noticed it on a few machines.

Why does it happen?

Don't know yet. One of the reasons it might happen is if you have a USB based headset. If you initiate Flash while the headset is plugged in (that is, load flash for the first time), it will set the headset up as it's default input/output. If you then take out the headset, Flash still points towards the default output, as it doesn't poll sound output availability.

This could happen in any situation where the available input/output is changed after being initialized. It could also happen with faulty vid and sound drivers, or even bad memory (which causes faulty drivers which causes etc).

Paul said...

I should add that you can usually get around the problem, as I've seen it in the wild, by closing all instances of Firefox and then opening it again.

M. Simon said...

What seems to work for me is to reload FLASH player and IE Explorer.

BTW it happened again a few days ago.

I saw this suggested on some chat room.