Fix for NFL.com Flash video problems
December 2nd, 2007 . by polyGeekIt seems as though the post I wrote about the NFL.com switching to Flash video has become the de facto support page for people having trouble watching their videos. There are 30 comments so far mostly about people having trouble getting the videos to play. Even some of the NFL.com developers have commented there.
A few readers who have reported issues found that they were able get everything working properly by shutting down McAfee security. Here’s what a reader reported:
If you have comcast w/ the McAfee security here’s how to fix it. Click “Internet and network” click “configure” on the right side. Under web browsing protection click “advanced”. Simply uncheck the “block advertisements” box and hit apply.
I haven’t had any issues myself but I don’t have McAfee security. From what I’ve been able to piece together the issue lies with the communication between the HTML navigation and the Flash video player they built.
If you’re having trouble then hopefully this will take care of it.
Another solution was given by DJ on the other post. If you are using AdBlock with Firefox, it may be blocking the videos due to the advertisement at the beginning. I hadn’t been able to view any videos on NFL.com for a while but once I disabled AdBlock, I had no trouble seeing highlights once again.
Ok, I believe I figured out what exactly it was. For users of the Norton Personal Firewall (not McAfee…), if the stuff isn’t showing up, you likely have the ad blocking feature on the firewall turned on.
Open up your Norton security center and configure your ad block settings. In that window uncheck “Turn Ad Block on.” Now you’ll need to probably clear your firefox cache and reboot your computer, or firefox will just attempt to load the pages with the content already blocked.
The downside is, obviously, that annoying ads will come through. But, the entire NFL.com site *should* work after this. The videos page does, and I noticed today that some of the rollover flash content was working as well. I’ve yet to test the game centers in Firefox, but I’ll know about that come Sunday.
Hope this helps some people.
As a side note, it looks like all the solutions involve disabling ad blocking tools of some sort or another. Isn’t there a better way to encode all the site’s java and flash content so that it won’t raise that red flag for so many different programs? Just a thought…
I think all these problems could have been solved if the video and video navigation were all one Flash app. It’s the communication between the two that is getting blocked.
Hi ! I’ve got the same problem with the videos at nfl.com. I’ve tried with Firefox, IE 7 and even the Avant browser as someone said in the other post but nothing has worked… I have reinstalled Flash player, I have uninstalled AdBlock and that still won’t work. Now, I have an error : (it was originally in french because I’m french but I tried to translate it more or less in the right way)
Warning : Property « margin-top » unknown. Declaration abandoned.
source file : http://static.nfl.com/static/site/styles/video/video.css
Line : 194
Warning : « : » expected, but « undefined » found. Declaration abandoned.
source file: http://www.nfl.com/videos
@Cathy, that error is for the CSS which I wouldn’t think would have anything to do with the videos playing. Maybe someone reading this will have some help for you. I have nothing. Sorry.
If you go to your browsers settings and add nfl.com to the list of exceptions for websites that popups are no blocked from the videos work just fine after that
For all you fellow Mac users that are having trouble w/ Safari, you can select to recieve all cookies, and the videos work fine, except for the 15 second commercial…. arghh
On the other polyGeek post, “Steve” mentioned Avant Browser as a solution. It worked for me when IE mysteriously stopped working.
@everyone, I’m starting to think that there is some sort of voo-doo magic going on here. Either that or the Trilateral Commission is responsible for this mess. :-)
I have ZoneAlarm Pro on my system, and turned off Spy Site Blocking (Anti-Spyware section, Spy Site Blocking tab) and I no longer have trouble viewing the videos with Firefox or IE.
Check your HOSTS file as well. Flash will not work if the ad it wants to pull is blocked. Many programs (like Spybot or Hosts replacers like MVPS Hosts) will block the server it needs to pull from (either static.nfl.com or a doubleclick site). Your HOSTS file on MS systems is found in the system folder/drivers/etc
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