news items on cbc.ca cannot be viewed on Linux

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Mon Apr 5 03:45:53 UTC 2010


I saw an interesting item on the National Thursday night.  I wanted to 
send it to my daughter.

With some difficulty, I found the item: 
  <http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/Canada/BC/ID=1457812038>

Unfortunately, it would not play without the proprietary Adobe Flash
plugin.  I don't have flash on my computer because it is the single
largest vector for malware on the web.

My daughter does have Flash on her computer but she could still not
see the item.  Why?

I tried with the same browser (FireFox with Flash plugin) on a WindowsXP 
system and the video was viewable.

After much wasted time, I came across this:
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/455852>
CBC videos don't play on a Linux system, even with the required Flash
plugin.

Apparently this is a known bug with the CBC website that the CBC
so far has refused to fix.  See
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.5/+bug/455852/comments/17>

The web in general, and Flash in particular, is designed to be
OS-agnostic.  So there is no reason why UberPlayer (the source of the
problem) should fail under Linux.  Since it is proprietary code it is
hard for me to determine the coding flaw.

Surely CBC paid for this code and the vendor should actually be
responsible for fixing it.  A reasonable vendor would not even charge
for fixing bugs.

Could you intercede?  This is blocking my access to news on the CBC
site and that would seem to come under your mandate.
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