Saturday, August 15, 2009

Flash problem finally over!

For some time, I have been having problems with Flash videos from one specific resource: the Daily Show (and Colbert Report), both streamed by Comedy Central. (Or is it MTV? Oh, whatever.)

Point is, the video would load, but a little popup would show in it saying something like: "Error loading stylesheet. RSL http://media.mtvnservices.com/global/flex/rsl/framework_3.2.0.3958.swz failed to load. Error #2046".

And I couldn't get rid of this thing. Opera wasn't able to show it either. Going back to Windows every time and firing up IExplorer wasn't so exciting either. So I tried to reinstall, uninstall and reconfigure all those flash libraries (okay, there's really two or three of them), and just couldn't get it work. Until, many websites later, I simply tried to uninstall flashplugin-nonfree and installed the adobe-flashplugin from Adobe's website directly. Strange thing happened... it worked. Sometimes it's not that hard at all.

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On the side, I learned of an interesting little setting for later use. In Firefox, visit the about:config page, search for 'plugin' and double-click on the line plugin.expose_full_path. Since you are changing your most basic configuration, you should probably know, what it does. (Funnily enough, Opera allows to display and change this information much more easily. Hm. I still like Firefox more.)

This little setting shows the full path to plugins on the about:plugin page. Extremely useful for debugging your plugins and their actual versions, as reinstalling newer versions sometimes leaves the old stuff behind. Maybe it will help some people out.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

it didnt work for me

manfred said...

Given that it is a year, I dare to guess, that it may be a different problem - is the message the same as before?

Unknown said...

Hi Manfred,
I am also having this problem.
The message is:
Error loading stylesheet. RSL http://media.mtvnservices.com/global/flex/rsl/framework_3.2.0.3958.swz failed to load. Error #2046

The wierd thing is that I have a notebook (also 64 bit) and it works. When I search for all files on / -mount, both systems appear to be identical.

These are what the files look like:
1709501 116 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 117960 Aug 8 17:39 /var/lib/flashplugin-installer/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
658035 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so -> /etc/alternatives/mozilla-flashplugin
1447834 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/lib/xulrunner/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so -> /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-flashplugin
1447830 11512 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11787664 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so
1447832 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so -> /etc/alternatives/iceweasel-flashplugin
1447833 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so -> /etc/alternatives/firefox-flashplugin
796780 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Aug 8 18:00 /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so -> /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-addons-flashplugin
1447831 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/lib/iceape/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so -> /etc/alternatives/iceape-flashplugin
664201 12 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10704 Oct 11 2009 /usr/lib/libvisual-0.4/morph/morph_flash.so
657498 208 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 209480 Jun 3 08:06 /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.2/program/libflashlx.so
1447835 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 40 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/lib/midbrowser/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so -> /etc/alternatives/midbrowser-flashplugin
1447836 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 58 Aug 8 17:39 /usr/share/ubufox/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so -> /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so

I am very confused.
I wish there was a series of steps that "really" work.

regards,

Roger M.

PM said...

I found the solution that worked for me: make sure that your systems computer time and date are correct. In the lower right corner of Windows, make sure that the time and date are correct.

In my case, the battery that is responsible for keeping my computer's date correct has run out of juice and the date keeps reseting back to 1995.

If I leave it on that date, I get the: "http://media.mtvnservices.com/global/flex/rsl/framework_3.2.0.3958.swz failed to load. Error #2046" error
but if I change it, the error goes away.

manfred said...

Nice hint that may help some people, thanks pm!

Thalience said...

I just found that I had an old firefox profile hanging around in my home directory (.mozilla/firefox/), when firefox actually uses .firefox on my system. Deleting the old profile allowed me to view the videos.

You may think that this couldn't be the problem since the website fails in multiple browsers (chrome etc). However, I traced the plugin and found that it always tries to access the firefox (really xulrunner) certificate database even when run from other browsers.

Hope this helps anyone who finds that it works from a fresh user account, but not for their normal one.

Anonymous said...

Wow, thank you so much pm!

I made the usual mistake of going through the steps before reading the comments.

I had recently set the time and date manually on my MacBook to make an outdated version of BootCamp launch.

When I set the time and date to auto, the videos would load.

Thanks again!

hipsterical said...

[SOLVED]
I tried this fix but did not work, so decided to troubleshoot it myself and discovered that this is caused by corruption of the file ~/.mozilla/firefox/********.default/secmod.db
where ********.default is the profile directory (name variable) .
secmod.db is apparently a sqlite database file. remove (or rename, ex.: secmod.db.old) the file secmod.db and restart firefox. the file will be automatically replaced with a new copy, different but of the same size of the previous one.