Webmaster Forum / Flash / General Flash Topics / July 2008

I develop for a company that provides widgets for MySpace and other social
networks. Over the last few weeks we've been receiving quite a few complaints
from users on our forums. The gist is that Flash video or mp3 players are not
functioning correctly on MySpace. They all seem to load fine (indicating that
Flash is installed), but the functionality of the players or Flash itself is
broken. This seems to not be confined to IE or FF but does appear to be only
Windows users. This doesn't seem to only affect our widgets, even MySpace's own
video and music apps are receiving complaints as well.

What's strange is that I've not updated our code in almost a month, so I'm
pretty sure this is either a Flash Player or MySpace bug.

Some of the complaints:

Flash will work fine on my machine UNTIL I VISIT A MYSPACE PAGE. After that,
flash videos will freeze-up after 2 seconds on any flash video, song or
playlist... on any webpage, regardless of whether it is myspace or not. If I
clear my cache, then things work fine... but only until I visit a Myspace page
again. I've heard of other people having the 2-second-mark freeze problem. But
I've never heard of anyone specifically tracking the problem to Myspace.

This user's config:

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15)
Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15
JavaScript Enabled: Yes
Cookies Enabled: Yes
Flash Version: 9.0.124.0

Another user's config:

Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Zango 10.3.65.0; IEMB3)
JavaScript Enabled: Yes
Cookies Enabled: Yes
Flash Version: 9,28

Is it possible that antivirus programs are affecting Flash files on MySpace?
Or does anyone have any ideas?