Firefox: No Sound in Videos, Videos Stop Playing After A Few Seconds

A significant issue has arisen with Flashplayer (video player for Youtube.com, Funnyordie.com and many others) in Firefox… many videos that I have tried playing at home and at work recently have not worked. The whole video loads and I can move the cursor to any point in the video, but the video has no sound and quits playing after only a few seconds. After doing some research online, I have discovered that many other users have also had problems with Flashplayer in Firefox and having their videos mess up, so I will share some troubleshooting tips I have come across and what has worked for me:

If your video stops after after a few seconds and you have no sound with your Flashplayer video try the following troubleshooting tips:

-Close and reopen Firefox. For many people this temporarily solves the issue of videos with no sound.
-Simply play the video in Internet Explorer. I hate to have to suggest this tip, since I am an ENORMOUS firefox fan, but it is the solution that I have used as most of the others haven’t worked for me (though they have for some people).
-Reinstall an older version of Flashplayer. Running 9.0.47.0 now and it seems to be ok.

I got the version 9.0.47.0 at the “Archived Flash Players available for
testing purposes” page:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266&sl…

Extracted the .47 version and (after uninstalling all flash) ran the windows
installer. Seems to work fine in Firefox now.

I’ve changed settings to keep Flash from updating unless I okay it Change your
flash settings by means of the following page:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/s…

Uninstall Realplayer. Apparently having both RealPlayer and FlashPlayer both installed has caused conflicts for some people.

– Try to clear your private data.‚  Apparently, broken cookies & files in your temporary internet folder can screw up the playing of lots of videos.‚  Click on Tools then on Clear Private Data and make sure all the boxes are checked.‚  Finally hit Clear Private Data.

If anyone else has any tips or a great solution to the problem of there being no sound in videos on Firefox and the videos stopping after several seconds for no reason, please add your ideas to the comments!

Published by

Joel Gross

Joel Gross is the CEO of Coalition Technologies.

11 thoughts on “Firefox: No Sound in Videos, Videos Stop Playing After A Few Seconds”

  1. thank you so “verily mulch” … after using the adobe special uninstaller (ref’d above), i put in 9.0.45 since i had it handy. oh, running vista and used actual administrator account (not my added admin account).

    music to my ears now ….

  2. VLC is another problem with Firefox and can be found it a lot of forums. If you cannot play any videos in Firefox and you have VLC then get rid of it and try Gom Player which does the same thing without any conflicts.

  3. @szilsi

    The disable-then-enable the Flash plugin (then reload de videos) worked for me. Good trick!. Before this, I had to use IEtab to view the videos with the IE engine (and sometimes, even that didn’t work, and I had to open a real IE-based brower -IE, Avant, Maxthon…)
    Firefox and Flash developers should tackle this issue, because is very annoying.

  4. User account controls can cause a lot of problems with restricting access between firefox and flash player

  5. Video and sound still stops after a few seconds with Flash 10.0 r22 on centos FF3.0.7. Seems to happen after coming out of suspend. Thanks for the tip on disabling and enabling the Flash plugin. At least I don’t have to restart FF now. I’ve disabled Real Player too. Hopefully that’ll help.

  6. Glad I found your blog entry. This happened to me too, at least once.

    But this time, it’s happened in Firefox 3.5.3 with the ‘pushed’ Flash plugin upgrade, version 10.0.32.18. I run a fully updated WinXP SP3. I beat the problem by disabling and re-enabling the Flash plugin under Tools – Add-Ons – Plugins. Hope it doesn’t reoccur. At first I thought it might have something to do with the new Bluetooth wireless sound setup I just installed, but no. I knew it was specific to Fx when I noticed audio still playing everywhere else on the PC, including IE like you suggest. Thanks, and hope this entry helps someone else too.

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