[CentOS] Firefox Video Capability

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2018 at 08:03, Chris Olson via CentOS <centos at centos.org> wrote:
>
> One of our summer interns has stayed on during the school
> year to work some weekends on special projects. This past
> weekend, her assignment was to trouble shoot problems with
> Firefox when trying to view various on-line training videos.
>
> At some web sites, the video associated with the page will
> not play and we get the messages shown below.  The Download
> statement is actually a link and was used to download this
> rpm file: adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm.
>
> "Cannot Play Video"
>
> "The latest version of Adobe Flash is
> required to play this video."
>
> "Download the free Flash player here."
>

In order for flash to work, the flash plugin must be installed on the
computer. The reason that Flash is working on the Windows systems is
that the Flash software must be installed and must have some sort of
policy to allow it to run.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keep-flash-up-to-date-and-troubleshoot-problems

[SECURITY WARNING. FLASH IS NOT SAFE SOFTWARE ON ANY OPERATING SYSTEM
SEE ADDENDUM]

However that warning aside, you need to get training done. In order to
get flash installed on CentOS you can do the steps outlined in
https://www.tecmint.com/install-adobe-flash-on-centos-rhel-fedora-linux/
but I am rewriting step 1 as it is clearly secure

0. Stop any existing firefox sessions
1. wget wget http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
2. yum localinstall adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
3. yum update
4. yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl
5. start a new firefox.
6. go to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

You should be asked to allow flash plugin to run. Go up to the URL bar
at the top of the browser and to the left of the URL there should be
something that looks like a lego block or a car battery. Click on it
and allow flash.  You will need to do this for every website or change
the browser settings to allow it as Flash is considered a security
risk these days. Since it is working on your other systems, this must
be done via a GPT or never updating the firefox/flash to a version
which requires addtional controls.

Flash is considered to at the end of its functional life, so please
let your training program know they need to move to another video
source in the next 1.5 years at that point it will probably become a
security audit risk.

https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/adobes-move-to-kill-flash-is-good-for-security/d/d-id/1329472
https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/450423574/Adobes-Flash-end-of-life-scheduled-finally-for-2020

https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/
https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome/
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/#oSoUy0Wbu5Gtaipg.97



> The intern did not install this rpm because doing so outside
> of yum did not seem like a good idea.  We also do not really
> know how the Adobe Flash utility is called up by Firefox and
> whether or not the installation would solve the problem or
> possibly cause other problems.
>
> This problem is not happening on our Windows 7 machines, but
> not everyone here has a Microsoft machine to use.  On Windows,
> the Firefox occasionally updates itself when launched so that
> might explain the difference.  The training videos always do
> play on Windows 7 systems when the web pages are brought up.
>
> We also noticed that on Windows 7 there are no Firefox
> related processes remaining after closing all Firefox browsers.
> This is not the case on our CentOS 6 systems as indicated in
> the output below.
>
> Is this video viewing issue a common problem, and if it is,
> can someone provide some direction to correct it.
>
> Thanks.
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> [user at computer ~]$ ps -elf | grep firefox
>
> 0 S user     3872     1  0  80   0 - 68607 poll_s Nov08 ?
> 00:00:00 /usr/lib64/firefox/bundled/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
>
> 0 S user     8178  8149  0  80   0 - 25832 pipe_w 19:42 pts/2
> 00:00:00 grep firefox
>
> [user at computer ~]$
>
>
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.