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[Linux] Vines won't play; about:config setting does not exist. Help?

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

ElenTheMellon
ElenTheMellon
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I'm on Ubuntu 14.04. Vines stopped playing for me recently, on Firefox. I've been furiously googling; but every single person who has the same problem as me has said that they solved it by setting the about:config setting "media.windows-media-foundation.enabled" from false to true.

As you can see in the following screenshot, that setting simply *does not exist* on my copy of Firefox.

http://s24.postimg.org/y4he3cz2r/2015_03_26_01_17_57.png

And yes, I've tried clearing my cookies, resetting everything, disabling plugins, yada-yada-yada.

Someone please help?

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04. Vines stopped playing for me recently, on Firefox. I've been furiously googling; but every single person who has the same problem as me has said that they solved it by setting the about:config setting "media.windows-media-foundation.enabled" from false to true. As you can see in the following screenshot, that setting simply *does not exist* on my copy of Firefox. http://s24.postimg.org/y4he3cz2r/2015_03_26_01_17_57.png And yes, I've tried clearing my cookies, resetting everything, disabling plugins, yada-yada-yada. Someone please help?

All Replies (2)

NoahSUMO
NoahSUMO
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Hi Elen,

The media.windows-media-foundation.enabled setting only works on Windows. I think that's why it doesn't appear for you on Linux. I checked about:config in my Firefox on Windows and that setting is there by default.

You can force create that preference if you really want to try it. I don't think it will work on Linux but maybe it's worth a try.

With the about:config page open, right-click on any setting and choose New > Boolean. A box will popup, copy and paste media.windows-media-foundation.enabled into it, click OK. Then in next prompt, choose true. Close Firefox and open it again. Visit a Vine page and try to play a video.

I'm not sure why Vines would stop playing on Linux unless they stopped using flash or they increased the version requirement for flash and that broke the videos. I checked and the latest version of Flash for Ubuntu is 11.2.202.310 and for other linux distros the latest is 11.2.202.451.

If you have Chrome installed, do Vines at least work on that? I hate Chrome myself for opening too many processes so I hate to suggest that. But we need to do some kind of comparison on your system to see if Vine.co is just being stupid and alienating Linux users because they don't care about them.

cor-el
cor-el
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On Linux you need GStreamer support for playing MP4 files with the HTML5 media player.

  • media.gstreamer.enabled = true