Videos in Faceache don't play
 

SWMBO gets many Faceache links with videos sent to her. These invariably fail to play, we don't know why. Thinking that there was a compatibility issue with whatever was trying to play them I installed VLC on her machine 'cos VLC can play anything! They still don't play. She is logged in. When she clicks the link a video screen opens in a Firefox window showing a still from the video with a PLAY arrow (triangel in a circle). Clicking on this causes the still view to turn black with the circle chasing BUSY indicator but after about half a second it goes back to the still picture. I am not sure that the VLC is the default player for these videos as I don't know what format the videos are encrypted to. The behaviour was the same before the installation of VLC..............

The system is Win XP with loads of memory and CPU grunt.

Any ideas please?

Rans6.............

Windows XP is almost certainly causing the problem, push the boat out and use an operating system that's still supported and isn't full of security flaws!

ps our own movies and Youtube files play as expected.

Rans6....

I was beginning to wonder if the OS was falling short of the required security stuff just as my Samsung S3 phone did. Everything in the phone such as camera, calculator and GPS Apps still worked fine but web browsing and my banking App just stopped hacking it.

Rans6.........

Back in the day, web sites used Flash Player to show videos. Everyone's now moving off Flash and using HTML5 instead. Some sites detect that HTML5 doesn't work and revert to Flash, but maybe Facexxxx has dropped Flash entirely. I take it that your Firefox is an old version, probably about version 52 (the current version is 80), because Mozilla stopped support for Firefox on XP some years ago; if so, your Firefox may not do HTML5.
XP was good, but the world has moved on (not only Microsoft) and I'm afraid Specaircrew may be right: it's time to upgrade to Windows 10. If your system has 'loads of memory and CPU grunt' it can probably run Windows 10, and I think you'll find that it doesn't take too much getting used to.

Windows XP has been unsupported since 2014. It is a danger to itself and others if connected to the internet. There is only one answer to this question: replace it.

SD