650977 - Audio not loading into QuickTime plug-in since Firefox 4

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Plugins Graveyard :: QuickTime (Apple), defect)

Description

[Derek Williams]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

This plays in Safari, but since I updated to Firefox 4, has stopped working.  A few of the thers on the same page http://www.derekwilliams.net/services/composing_arranging_orchestration/ play but, now load excruciatingly slowly.



Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.derekwilliams.net/services/composing_arranging_orchestration/
2. Click the Neruda song sample
3. Goes to page and nothing happens
Actual Results:  
First time, a dialog appears saying a that a plug-in is missing.  If Continue is clicked, a page chock-a-block full of sites to branch to to load various plug-ins appears at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html?os=OSX&ctype=71746578&csubtype=ff9c8000, with no guidance as to which to choose to fix the particular one causing this problem.

This site worked perfectly with Firefox 3.6, but has now ceased to work on many pages where there are plug-ins, always with the Apple dialog and page full of sites coming up.  I have reinstalled everything under the sun in terms of audio players, including VLC, RealPlayer, WMV, Windows Media Player and Quicktime itself, but this problem just won't go way.

It's odd that some audio does load the Quicktime plug-in, and other mp3's dont.  In the Preferences>Applications tab, I have experimented with different settings, but again, to no avail.

Expected Results:  
The Quicktime playback bar should appear amid a blank page and just play the audio, like it does almost instantly on Apple's own Safari browser.

I will upload screenshots once the bug is listed.

Comment 1

[Derek Williams]

http://www.derekwilliams.net/audio/Neruda%20Song%204%20demo.mp3 is an example of a page that brings up the error as show in the attachment

Comment 2

[Derek Williams]

Attachment: screenshot of error message

If Continue is clicked on this dialog, it branches to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html?os=OSX&ctype=71746578&csubtype=ff9c8000, which is a page full of plug-in site addresses with no guidance as to which might fix the problem.  This has started appearing only since I updated from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4

Comment 3

[Derek Williams]

Comment on attachment 526867 [details]
screenshot of error message

Note that in this screenshot, the two buttons are greyed out.

Comment 4

[Derek Williams]

Attachment: screenshot of error message with active Continue button

This is the same as the other screenshot, except in this one, the Continue button is active and can be clicked, after which it branches to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html?os=OSX&ctype=71746578&csubtype=ff9c8000 with no guidance as to which site contains a likely fix to the problem.  I have already reinstalled all plug-ins that previously played audio/video.

Comment 5

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

WFM - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0a1) Gecko/20110417 Firefox/6.0a1 ID:20110417030531

Comment 6

[Derek Williams]

This is happening when a link in a Thunderbird email is clicked - see new image.

Comment 7

[Derek Williams]

Attachment: missing plug-in from Thunderbird email with links

This is happening when a link in a Thunderbird email is clicked - see new image.

Comment 8

[Derek Williams]

I've also noticed it is happening very often if a link in an email body in Thunderbird is clicked to branch into Firefox that this error is occurring.  I choose Cancel, and the thing loads regardless.

Comment 9

[Derek Williams]

Since no-one is looking at this, I am switching to Apple Safari

Comment 10

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Neither Tim (comment 5) nor I can reproduce this problem. Tim's on Windows which could be different, but I'm on a Mac and QuickTime never had a problem for me and doesn't on your page (I thoroughly enjoyed the Reel performance and arrangement and it was hard to believe the Neruda sample was synthesized).

I can't think of any reason Safari would behave differently from Firefox on your system: both use the same NPAPI interface to hand the content off to the external QuickTime player. According to your screenshots the player itself is launching (those dialogs aren't from Firefox) and whatever QuickTime you have should behave the same given the same content.

Is it possible you somehow have two copies of Quicktime Plugin installed, and Firefox is finding some old one that isn't being updated? You could search for "Quicktime Plugin.plugin" in spotlight (the magnifying glass usually in the upper right on a mac) and see if you find more than one. You could also visit http://www.mozilla.com/plugincheck/ to see if yours is way out of date.

You would have had better luck with this issue going through http://support.mozilla.com/ instead of the bug reporting database. The support folks are used to investigating one-off mysterious symptoms (and turning them into actionable bugs) while bug-fixing developers tend to be motivated by "progress" and will tend to ignore mysteries in favor of quickly diagnosed and fixed bugs unless several people are reporting the mystery.

I'm sorry we were not able to solve this problem for you.