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Installing The Flash Plugin© Copyright Darrell Anderson. (January 2007) Until recently I had suffered long and hard with a dial-up connection. I never bothered trying to run multimedia files with my web browsers and only seldom did I download a file to play manually on my box. I had better things to do than wait hours for these files to run or download. Yet after recently receiving a reasonable broadband connection (1 Mbps on a good day), I slowly began reconfiguring my box for multimedia support. I accepted that with my aging Windows NT4 that I might not be able to play all files, but I should be able to play the majority. Getting reconfigured was a challenge. My first obstacle was installing Windows Media Player 6.4. I pulled a lot of hair over that one, but eventually I ran into a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that provided me a clue. The installer package was hard-coded to look directly for a C:\Program Files directory. I do not have such a directory on my box, long ago having modified the registry to point my “program files” directory to my D: partition. Whoever designed that particular Microsoft installer package did not look in the registry but took the lazy way and assumed that such a directory existed. After I temporarily added that directory, the IE 4.01 installer worked just fine and then I could update the Media Player with the 6.4 package, security updates, and version 9 codecs. (Yes, after I installed and tested Windows Media Player 6.4, I deleted IE from my box.) I decided on three additional programs: QuickTime 6.52, WinAmp 2.95, and VLC 0.86. I find VLC buggy, but VLC does allow me to view some DivX files. I tried installing Real Player 8, but I found the installation so obnoxious about how to configure my computer, and when I tested I quickly grew weary of the message asking me to update, that I deleted the program from my box. I can live without Real Media files. My last multimedia obstacle was Flash. Sadly, a lot of web developers use Flash. Frankly, I don’t think I have missed much because most of my web time is looking for informational content rather than being entertained. Installing Flash was a basic computer horror story and I thought I’d share with anybody curious how I finally got the Flash browser plugin working on my NT4 box. The story is a fine example to demonstrate how computers are terribly complicated systems, and how some humans are anal, ignorant, morons. In Windows I use three browsers: K-Meleon 1.02, Firefox 2.0, and Opera 9.10. I use three browsers because basically all current browsers are poorly designed. My mood and needs determine which browser I use, but most often I use K-Meleon simply for the user interface speed, despite several quirks with that browser. Firefox and its awful XUL interface is as slow as an old dog in August, although the browser is a more richer experience when properly equipped with various extensions. I would like to use Opera more, but the inability to define the tab focus upon closing a tab drives me batty. I insist in using an older version of Windows, which means I often must research a product before trying to install. Most software developers are too anal and myopic to continue supporting older operating systems. I determined that I could use an older version of Flash on my box—version 7. My first challenge was downloading the correct Flash package. After visiting the Adobe web site I found I could not download any packages. I realized that the web page was designed with JavaScript, and the web page was programmed to determine which OS and browser I was using in order to direct my browser to an appropriate web page. I think people who cannot design a basic web page without using JavaScript are vermin. People who create web pages using JavaScript must be paid by the hour rather than the job. Just provide static links and be done with second-guessing. I don’t care how clever a person is, I only want a navigable web site. Additionally, those same people ought to learn to design a web site that is browser-independent. Third, what browser I use is nobody’s business so forget about sniffing user agent strings. I spoof those all the time. I finally found the files I wanted at the www.oldversion.com web site. But those files were not current. Adobe had released a version 7.0 r69 to fix some security flaws. Back to the Adobe web site. I had to enable JavaScript and toggle my user agent information. The site is designed to refuse to work unless the user agent is known. Anal morons. After downloading the installation packages, I thought I had installed the plugins. Indeed, after running the installation EXE, the npswf32.dll file appeared in each browser’s plugins directory. The flashplayer.xpt file also installed in the K-Meleon and Firefox components directory. Yet Flash refused to run. A lot of head scratching and experimenting followed. I next downloaded a couple of stand-alone Flash players: Swiff Player and Flash Movie Player. I neither endorse nor condemn either product. I merely wanted to try a stand-alone product to help me troubleshoot. Yet when I ran each player I received an error message that the Flash player was not installed. WTF? More browsing, searching, reading, and glassy eyes. More head scratching. Some butt scratching too. I ran a file monitoring program and then tried running the stand-alone Flash players. No clues. No needed files were missing on my system. I next ran a registry monitoring program. Reading the results of this program is terribly time consuming because of all the hits Windows makes on that idiocy known as the registry. But eventually I found a clue. The stand-alone Flash players could not find a class ID registry entry of: HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8–444553540000} Ah, finally! Something noteworthy. Back to the web. This registry entry did not exist on my box despite me running the Flash installation EXE. My next problem was then how to get the necessary information registered. About 10 minutes later I had a potential answer. I had to manually register C:\WINNT\System32\Macrome\Flash\flash.ocx. Lo and behold this file was not installed on my box. Once again: WTF? Back to the installation EXE. This time I downloaded a file called the Universal Extractor. The program acts much like WinZip, 7-Zip, etc., but instead works with EXE files that were created with an installer utility and often cannot be extracted with WinZip, 7-Zip, etc. Well, the Adobe Flash installer for Netscape-based browsers did not contain a flash.ocx file. So back to the web. I downloaded a huge Zip file that contained many versions of the Flash 7 files. I extracted the files for the installer for IE. That installer contained a flash7b.ocx file. I ran that installer and I then had a C:\WINNT\System32\Macrome\Flash directory containing the flash7b.ocx file. But I still had no registry entry for HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8–444553540000}. WTF? I’ve been around Windows a long time and next I tried manually installing the swflash.inf file. Next I ran regsvr32 flash7b.ocx. That did the trick. I now had my registry entries and installed files. Oops, but wait. The flash7b.ocx file was for IE and I am using Netscape-based browsers (K-Meleon and Firefox). So after manually copying flash.ocx to the same directory, I then typed regsvr32 flash.ocx, which was the OCX file that I probably should be using. Yet I received error messages. Having been around Windows a while I suspected I knew the problem. I opened the registry editor and tried manually modifying all entries from flash7b.ocx to flash.ocx. Nope. More error messages. I then fired up the clunkier version of the registry editor: regedit32.exe. I inspected the security parameters of the problematic keys. Sure enough, no permissions were defined, which basically meant no access—even with Administrator privileges. Apparently the Adobe people, in their zeal to abandon pre W2K versions of Windows, nonetheless maintain their registration packages as though everybody is using W2K or Windows XP. The registration of the OCX file was not fully compatible with NT4. I’m being charitable with that explanation because I believe this registry trick was intentional. Surfing the web reveals that many people have problems installing and removing the Flash software. Why? Because the Adobe people are tinkering with security parameters in the registry! I manually modified the security parameters on the affected keys and then updated all entries from flash7b.ocx to flash.ocx. Now I knew why the Adobe people insist that uninstalling Flash requires a special program. The anal Adobe morons modify the security parameters of the registry, that’s why. My conclusion? The Adobe people do not know how to create a proper installation executable. Their quality assurance sucks. They are anal vermin beyond description. I’m even inclined to think the people who create these installation packages are morons. But the story does not yet end. Now for the humorous part of the story! After finally overcoming the idiocy displayed by Adobe employees, I fired up my browsers and tried some web pages containing Flash files. Nothing. Nada. WTF? One nice distinction between Firefox and K-Meleon is that the latter is packaged with a Flash blocker. I enabled the feature simply so I could at least see the outline of the embedded Flash file in a web page. Yet when I selected the file to play, the outline box merely disappeared. Next I tried the following in Firefox: 1) temporarily disabled the ad blocker, 2) temporarily routed the browser around my Squid caching proxy, 3) temporarily allowed pop-ups, and 4) temporarily enabled JavaScript. I then temporarily configured the Proxomitron filtering proxy to Bypass. Still no Flash picture in Firefox. Then, I cannot explain how, something clicked in my little head. Remember my short introduction about not bothering with online multimedia files? The point to that quick history is that through all the previous years of suffering with dial-up I configured my browsers to avoid a lot of the overhead of multimedia. If I could not run multimedia then I might as well preclude having to see the stuff in the first place. Save some precious dial-up bandwidth. I opened the userContent.css file and sure enough, there was some code in the file to nuke all embedded files and drop all Flash files. I commented out those lines and restarted Firefox. Nothing. Nada. No image at all. But I then toggled to K-Meleon and Lo! I finally had a Flash image appear in that browser. I tried Opera and Flash then worked there too. No wonder: for all three browsers I use the same userContent.css file to improve my web surfing experience. With two browsers successfully playing Flash files I then knew that my underlying Windows installation was no longer the problem. I also then knew that Squid and Proxomitron were not causing any troubles because I had re-enabled them both. Now my only problem was Firefox, the browser I have slowly learned to detest. I checked the mime types. Flash files were not listed. Worse, the not-so-brilliant script kiddies who develop Firefox provide no direct way to add new mime types. Morons. There is a way, but users get only one chance at adding new mime types: by selecting a link with the new mime type and then instructing Firefox how to handle that type. But by this point I was getting tired and angry and had forgotten that indirect technique. I closed Firefox, and then copied my K-Meleon mimetypes.rdf file to my Firefox profile. That got Firefox to see the SWF mime type, but Firefox still would not display Flash files. Or so I thought. I tried another web site and I was able then to see the Flash file at that site. So why couldn’t I see the Flash file at the previous site while seeing the second—and seeing both Flash files in the other two browsers? I next booted Firefox in safe mode. Same results. One site was good the next site wasn’t. Back to the web for some clues. I really do hate Firefox at times. If the Firefox developers focused on usability rather than trying to prove they can strip a browser to bare essentials to make the browser unusable, they might have a decent product. Nope, too much of NIH (not invented here) runs through the Mozilla campus. I then paused to consider the possible problem. I then noticed that the Flash file on the non-working site was stored on a subnet of the parent web site. I had to temporarily toggle the NoScript extension to allow that URL to run JavaScript, in addition to the top level URL. I then finally saw the missing Flash file. Whew. Of the three browsers, I like the K-Meleon approach best with its built-in Flash blocker, which allows me to ignore most embedded Flash files. Even with my new broadband connection I still believe in saving bandwidth. Yeah, there is a Firefox Flash blocker extension that I could install to further bloat that browser, but why bother. I finally had my NT4 box reconfigured to support most multimedia files, including the dreaded Flash. Besides what irritates me most about Flash is that many web site developers embed the files in JavaScript rather than simple ordinary links. So I probably will not see a lot of Flash anyway because I surf almost exclusively with JavaScript disabled. And I still think the Adobe employees who designed the Flash installation packages are vermin. Anal morons. Finis. |
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