Ubuntu – Cannot load M3U8: No levels to play

firefoxgoogle-chromevideo streaming

i'm not able to watch some streaming channels anymore.

I only get this message:
Cannot load M3U8: No levels to play, both on Chrome (54.0.2840.100 64-bit) and Firefox (53.0 64-bit), everything seems to be up to date, i'm running Ubuntu 16.04.

Everything was working fine until some month ago, then i started watching that channel through another link and it worked. Now it doesn't anymore, same M3U8 error message.

Recently i installed an old WinXP image using virtualbox, i tried using IE8 to watch the channel and it works!

Of curse i'd like to avoid running winXP to play a streaming channel, how to make it work under ubuntu?

Thanx!

Best Answer

I'd suggest trying another browser.

I get full Flash and Java functionality in SeaMonkey (Firefox engine, skinned to look and act like the old Netscape Navigator Suite, including integrated e-mail and IRC chat clients as well as HTML editor), using update-sun-jre and pepperflashplugin (the latter uses the Chrome Pepper Flash plugin wrapped to match the API the Firefox core expects). Both plugins are as up to date as they can be, and update automatically through the standard Ubuntu software update process (though at least one requires enabling an additional repository -- which itself is considered a security risk).

Unfortunately, if you're an "open software" purist, both of these plugins use proprietary code -- but they're what works, at least for me.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Google Chrome lost the up-to-date Flash Player

Edited 2017-02-28

It has happened some things with Flash recently:

Previously Flash was shipped with Google Chrome, but it isn't any longer in the same way as before.
Hence the pepperflashplugin-nonfree package is currently broken, even if it is about to be fixed (new download location).
Chrome ships Flash bundled with Chrome, and there is nothing extra which needs to be done if you use Chrome.

adobe-flashplugin provides Flash plugins for other browsers, both Firefox and Chromium/Opera/Vivaldi.

Try this:

Close Google Chrome.

Remove both adobe-flashplugin and pepperflashplugin-nonfree.

sudo apt purge adobe-flashplugin pepperflashplugin-nonfree

Open Google Chrome and check if it made a difference.

My experience is that you may need to close and reopen Chrome a couple of times before Flash starts working.

Ubuntu – Cannot Load Sites unless connected to VPN

Edit: "I cannot access few websites and portal"

If you are not able to access some websites, there may be an ACL on these networks (such as a public IP limitation), or you could have routing issues to the subnets in which they resolve.

For example, if you can't reach mytest.portal.business.com and it resolves as 10.1.1.3, then this would stipulate it's an internally hosted service that you've got a static record for. If a large portion of websites work (such as YouTube, Google, AskUbuntu) but a subset don't, this would indicate more of an issue with networking/routing than the system in itself.

If you're able to successfully resolve (via nslookup) and test an ICMP connection (ping) then this denotes you have network connectivity; if you perform sudo apt upgrade -y and it functions, you have networking connectivity and this brings the issue down to an application fault.

In this instance, it appears that you're in fact using WiFi as your connection medium, as denoted by your ip a which resulted in:

wlp3s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 5c:e0:c5:3a:7d:0c brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.0.107/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute wlp3s0
       valid_lft 85831sec preferred_lft 85831sec
    inet6 fe80::f9d:3b03:c8d4:43e3/64 scope link noprefixroute 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

DHCP

First and foremost, I would confirm that you're getting DHCP on the same logical subnet as other clients that are working - this is simple, compare ip a on hosts to ensure you're in the same range. For example, this could be 192.168.0.1 or 172.20.20.1 but (usually) neither together.

To view your DHCP configuration (if you're using netplan) you can run ls -l /var/lib/NetworkManager, and what is most important is cat your lease file - for me:

cat /var/lib/NetworkManager/internal-16fa33b0-caa7-3219-a480-331e166fd77c-eno2.lease 
# This is private data. Do not parse.
ADDRESS=192.168.0.116
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ROUTER=192.168.0.1
SERVER_ADDRESS=192.168.0.1
T1=42600
T2=74550
LIFETIME=85200
DNS=208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220
DOMAINNAME=loopback.local
CLIENTID=01b42e9933fa61

Make sure in the DHCP lease, your router IP address is your local router - and not another IP address you cannot route to without a VPN connection (additional adapter).

DNS

The first test is to ensure your DNS is not the fault, run resolvectl status | grep "DNS Servers" to list the current server you're using; you can update this to be something such as 1.1.1.1 as a test:

# See man:systemd-resolved.service(8) for details about the supported modes of
# operation for /etc/resolv.conf.
nameserver 1.1.1.1

Proxy Server

At this point in time, if you're not able to resolve websites (well, load), move on to diagnosing if your system is using a proxy: env | grep proxy - if you're using a proxy, it'll return an answer. You can find more answers on diagnosing proxies here.

Firewalls

On Ubuntu, you can disable the Firewall temporarily to see if this is contributing. For firewalld the command is:

systemctl stop firewalld   # Disables the Firewall
systemctl status firewalld # Gets the firewall's status

For ufw, perform the following:

sudo ufw status verbose # Gets the firewall's status
sudo ufw disable        # Disables the Firewall

You could further diagnose this by performing a netstat or a Wireshark capture, if you believed this a networking issue.

Application Diagnostics

From this point, if your browser still doesn't want to load, load an additional browser such as Vivaldi, and see if the same issue occurs. You can run the application via the terminal to get output - or using inbuilt console.

Lastly - as I had this happen to me once - I had a strange "profile" issue with my wireless network. I had to remove the network and reconnect/establish to get it working.