Life without Flash

[ppppenguin]

Since Flash is nasty, buggy, vulnerable technology that should have been exterminated years ago I've been trying to live my life without it. My main browser is Firefox, with Chrome also installed. I know IE is there but never gets used.

So far, Youtube has worked perfectly without Flash. The BBC has been very variable. All current video and audio works OK but some older stuff doesn't. For example this item which was repeated on World Service in the early hours:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p042vhkh

This one (some of you may have seen it before ) gives a different error. Not sure it's due to absence of Flash so could somebody please give another opinion please:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8159406.stm

My plan is to have Flash on Chrome but not Firefox. Similarly I have 3rd party cookies blocked on FF but leave them enabled on Chrome. This is for those annoying ticket booking websites which fail unless they're enabled.

[hamid_1]

I'm also using a PC without Flash - it's an old laptop which is too slow to play videos with the latest version of Flash, so I don't have it installed.

Maybe not much help, but I got the same results as you. The first penguin clip says "you need to install Flash player". The oldest television clip just says "Content Unavailable".

My solution for watching videos from the BBC website involves using some free software called get_iplayer . I'm not sure if we should discuss this too much on here, since the use of get_iplayer is a bit of a grey area. In a nutshell, it enables you to download BBC videos and TV programmes and save them as a .mp4 file which can be played in VLC Media Player (even on my old laptop that's too slow to play Flash videos) or you can copy the mp4 file to a USB disk and play it on some DVD / Blu-ray players, thus making it possible to watch it on a real TV. Likewise you can save BBC radio programmes as .mp3 files, then listen to them off-line.

Youtube videos seem to play without Flash these days, but I've used a similar method to download videos using a website called keepvid.com - it's even easier than get_iplayer. No commands to type, simply copy and paste the address of the youtube video into the download box. Just beware there are multiple download buttons on the keepvid.com website, some of them could install unwanted software.