Cannot watch Twitter videos on Twitter or DU on a Chromebook

[DonaldsRump]

No issues with YouTube videos: they play fine.

This problem first manifested itself last week on two Chromebooks I use regularly. When I click on Twitter videos on both DU and on Twitter, I get a revolving white circle and then a message that "The media cannot be loaded." I've googled the heck out of this, and nothing seems to work. On my PCs, Twitter videos work fine on DU and Twitter, but not on the Chromebooks.

I've done everything I can think of like doing a soft reset, clearing the cache and cookies, turning off extensions. Nothing seems to work.

Help me please! Thank you!

[femmedem]

1. I'm a computer idiot but perhaps Flash is disabled. I found this:

https://blog.circleboom.com/why-are-my-twitter-videos-not-playing-on-chrome/

Good luck!

[DonaldsRump]

6. Thanks for this, but apparently Flash is now discontinued as of 12/31/2020.

There's no way I can reinstall it now.

[OnDoutside]

2. Could you remove and reinstall the Twitter app ?

[DonaldsRump]

7. I never had the Twitter app installed to begin with

It worked fine until the end of last week. I'm not a big fan of Twitter, but so many great posts on DU link to Twitter videos, that I can't really get the full effect of DU without a way to play these videos, except on PCs as opposed to my Chromebooks.

I guess I will do a PowerWash when I have some time.

[OnDoutside]

8. I have a Huawei tablet and I always get the Twitter login screen on its Chrome, which I can never

get past. However, I did download the app and created an account with a junk email address that I have, and any DU twitter links go straight to that. But it does seem to be a Chrome issue.

[DonaldsRump]

9. It may be something to do with the discontinuation of Flash

I doubt, though, that I'm the only DUer using a Chromebook (although I have PCs too). I think there's one other DU'er having the same problem. If it were a Chromebook-wide issue, I would have thought many more would have been experiencing this problem.

That's why I think I'm going to do a PowerWash and start afresh. Not the end of the world, but time consuming. However, please God, make it work for all the effort!

Thank you so much for your interest in helping out!

[OnDoutside]

10. Best of luck with it !

[canuckledragger]

3. Let's try to break it down...

Chromebooks use a Linux based operating system, so any solutions will be exclusive to that.

From a quick bit of research, it looks the OS supports a limited amount of video formats, so that one sounds suspicious. It could be you don't have the codecs needed to play it properly.

http://www.multipelife.com/play-mp4-on-chromebook.html

[Elwood P Dowd]

4. Do you have the current Chrome OS

87.0.4280.152? Also, isn't there a Chrome extension you can download to play Twitter videos? Mine play fine so I've never tried it, but maybe that can help.

[DonaldsRump]

11. As far as I can tell, yes

I regularly update the OS on the Chromebooks.

While it's a slight bit of a pain, I will try a PowerWash to try to get everything going again. That folks like you don't have a problem strongly suggest that the issue is with my devices. However, the one thing that befuddles me is that I have two separate Chromebooks that I regularly use. Both of them are demonstrating this problem, but my PCs are not.

Thank you for your help!

[DonaldsRump]

5. Thank you all for all the helpful comments and quick responses

Unfortunately, nothing is working.

I guess I will do a PowerWash of the Chromebooks. That's a pain, as it means I have to save all the stuff on the hard drive and reinstall the apps. I can't think of anything else I can do.

[DonaldsRump]

12. Finally solved the issue!

It had nothing to do with anything except a security setting on my router. I had made a change on my personal network last week, and had to do a lot of resetting of devices. I didn't realize the small but pronounced effect that change would have on a couple of my devices.

I finally figured out today that it was nothing to do with Chrome or the Chromebook when I was looking at a DU post this morning with a JPEG image link that wasn't working. When I tried to open that image in another tab, it said that the the "connection has closed unexpectedly".

That wasn't the error that I was expecting, as it indicated there was something between my device and the image server causing the problem rather than my device itself. This made me think of the router change I had recently made. I just changed one security setting for the Chromebooks giving me the the problem of not being able to watch Twitter videos, bingo!: everything now works fine.

I'm no expert, but I try to fix things via trial and error. This is a classic example of thinking about any changes around the time a problem surfaces on your devices like I did to the network. In hindsight, it was IMMEDIATELY after I made the change that Twitter videos stopped working. I spent hours focusing on the device, trying to re-install the now obsolete Flash, doing resets, clearing cookies and caches, posting on DU about my device, etc. totally neglecting something outside my device like the router.

That will save me a few hours of time now that I don't have to do a PowerWash.

Thanking all of you again for your help, but this was totally a problem uniquely mine!