Bug 18165 – Southparkstudios videos do not play

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: WONTFIX
• Component: Page Loading

[Charlie Monroe]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this isn't a flash-specific issue, but it works just fine in Firefox on the same machine, under the same account (I believe they all use the same plugin)...

Go here: http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103600, click on the Play Now, and a new window will be brought up with a flash player - it loads, but it will not start, not even after pressing the play button several times. In Firefox, the movie loads up and starts playing automatically (there's a commercial in the beginning, so technically it starts playing the commercial)...

I hope this gets fixed sometime, as I really hate using Firefox :)

Best,

Charlie

[Matt Lilek]

This (and the entire site) works fine for me with Flash Player 9.0 r115.

[Charlie Monroe]

Not sure what I'm doing wrong: I go to http://www.southparkstudios.com/, pick a season, pick an episode, and press the Play Episode - new window pops up, all the images load and I see the movie "progress bar" and the play button, but nothing happens...

I have reinstalled the Flash player (9.0 r115.0) - I'm on Intel 10.5.2 with all security updates installed (if this matters) - with no change... The rest of the page is black and nothing is played...

I don't think this would be a port issue either, as it works fine in Firefox (unless FF automatically maps ports)...

Charlie

[Ananta]

Looks like the site expects a valid referer to be set in HTTP Get requests issued by the flash plugin. With Firefox the referer is set to southparkstudios.com. IE7/IE8 always set the referer to the URL of the flash movie. Opera/Google chrome always set the referer to the containing frame url i.e., southparkstudios.com/episodes. 

A similar fix could be attempted. However it would break the following URL.
http://www.oneava.cn/read.php?tid=49

A quick glance at the HTTP headers from IE and chrome reveal the following:-

Here are the headers caught with chrome:

060.247.104.099.07961-059.175.133.025.00080: GET 
/19678964764/020064010048425D28CABD00380F414E90E8FF-9EB6-4DCF-0858-
C5378F42C4EC.flv HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) 
AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
Referer: http://www.oneava.cn/read.php?tid=49
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: zh-CN,zh
Accept-Charset: gb18030,*,utf-8
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,bzip2
Host: 59.175.133.25
Connection: Keep-Alive

Here are IE's headers:

060.163.233.090.03560-059.175.133.025.00080: GET 
/196f7764764/020064070047241199C96F0048CFA690E8D0F3-B2A8-7E99-061C-
C5114F6C4B05.flv?start=170 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: zh-CN
Referer: http://static.youku.com/v1.0.0320/v/swf/qplayer.swf
x-flash-version: 9,0,124,0
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Connection: Keep-Alive
Host: 59.175.133.25

Basically they need to check the referer to make sure the request comes 
from the flash they created, instead of a download link. IE gives referer 
as the url of flash swf, while chrome/opera gives the url of the page, which 
fails their check. 

As it is not documented what the referer header should contain in geturl requests going out from plugins, does it make sense to match IE7/IE8?

[Oliver Hunt]

Marking as a windows bug.

[Ananta]

Logged a new bug https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20739 to track the issue with http://www.oneava.cn/read.php?tid=49.

[Ahmad Saleem]

Since it was Flash specific site in the past and now it is HTML5 video play - I just tested and now it works.

Further, NPAPI support is removed from Safari 14 onward and from other WebkitGTK ports. Can this be marked as "WONTFIX"? Thanks!