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Getting CNN video to work on Firefox / Mac
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CNN recently course corrected their online video strategy and decided to abandon the subscription-based Pipeline service in favour of free video on demand. I think that is a great move and in line with other major news outlets such as Reuters who have been providing high quality free video on demand for a while now. Anyway, even though the content is now free, technology intervened to really ruin the experience.
Using my preferred browser, Firefox 2.0 (sidenote : Firefox seems to be getting buggier by the week !), I navigated to the new CNN Video site which was recently re-designed with a clean look and feel. I can see all the thumbnails for the various video clips and I hit one off to check out the video quality. The audio for the clip came through crystal clear but no video ! I hate it when this happens as I knew I'll be in for some stuffing around to get this work. I've no problems viewing most (SMH.com is the only exception) any other embedded video on any other site such as YouTube, Reuters, MSNBC etc.
I fire up Google and did a search. I discovered that I wasn't alone and that alone is bad news. I tried many suggestions, installing Windows Media Player 9 for Mac, uninstalling Flip4Mac, cleared my cache and deleted cookies but all to no avail. Interestingly enough, I tried CNN video using the Web 2.0 browser, Flock, and it worked fine. Flock is also a Mozilla-based browser. I don't use Flock as my main browser as it is quite slow though I like it's user interface a lot.
Anyway, I digress. This story does have a good ending. I finally found a thread on the Mozilla site that recommended the use of a Firefox extension called User Agent Switching. User Agent Switching allows you to fool the web server into thinking that you are using a different web browser than what you are actually using. I installed the extension, restarted Firefox and set the user agent to "Netscape 4.8 (Windows Vista)" and voila, CNN video works !
If I can now figure out how to get the videos on SMH.com to work. I'll leave that battle to another day.
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CNN recently course corrected their online video strategy and decided to abandon the subscription-based Pipeline service in favour of free video on demand. I think that is a great move and in line with other major news outlets such as Reuters who have been providing high quality free video on demand for a while now. Anyway, even though the content is now free, technology intervened to really ruin the experience.
Using my preferred browser, Firefox 2.0 (sidenote : Firefox seems to be getting buggier by the week !), I navigated to the new CNN Video site which was recently re-designed with a clean look and feel. I can see all the thumbnails for the various video clips and I hit one off to check out the video quality. The audio for the clip came through crystal clear but no video ! I hate it when this happens as I knew I'll be in for some stuffing around to get this work. I've no problems viewing most (SMH.com is the only exception) any other embedded video on any other site such as YouTube, Reuters, MSNBC etc.
I fire up Google and did a search. I discovered that I wasn't alone and that alone is bad news. I tried many suggestions, installing Windows Media Player 9 for Mac, uninstalling Flip4Mac, cleared my cache and deleted cookies but all to no avail. Interestingly enough, I tried CNN video using the Web 2.0 browser, Flock, and it worked fine. Flock is also a Mozilla-based browser. I don't use Flock as my main browser as it is quite slow though I like it's user interface a lot.
Anyway, I digress. This story does have a good ending. I finally found a thread on the Mozilla site that recommended the use of a Firefox extension called User Agent Switching. User Agent Switching allows you to fool the web server into thinking that you are using a different web browser than what you are actually using. I installed the extension, restarted Firefox and set the user agent to "Netscape 4.8 (Windows Vista)" and voila, CNN video works !
If I can now figure out how to get the videos on SMH.com to work. I'll leave that battle to another day.
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- Posted by:
- Chris at
08.07.2007 / 15:03
Last updated 10.09.2010
- Category:
- Technology
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