I can't get videos to load on fancast

Hmmm. OK Cherieann, thanks for the info. Can you do me a favor?

I'd like to see what specific video types this happens with. Can you try to play a full episode from each of the following TV shows:

1) Heroes: http://www.fancast.com/tv/Heroes/1200...

2) Lost: http://www.fancast.com/tv/Lost/93942/...

3) Everybody Hates Chris: http://www.fancast.com/tv/Everybody-H...

When you click one of the play buttons for each of these shows, please describe for me what happens. For reference, what SHOULD happen is:

1) Heroes:The video player page opens, the video player shows the Fancast logo, a video ad is displayed in the player, then the video starts to play.

2) Lost: The video page opens, the video player shows a play icon and a message about "opening in a new window". When you click this play icon or the message, a new window opens and the ABC player loads in it.

3) Everybody Hates Chris: The video page opens, the video player shows a play icon and a message about "opening in a new window". when you click this play icon or the message, a new window opens and the CW player loads in it.

Thanks for your help!
Stephen

Not to hijack your thread, but I'm having a similar problem on one of my computers. It's a PowerPC G4, 1.5Gb ram, Mac OS 10.4.11, Safari 4 (beta), Flash 10.0 r22. I know it's a dated system, but why would it be some days I can play fancast videos and other times not? (even if it's the same video) I though I had fixed it once by resetting my preferences in MacOS; moving all recently changed prefs files to the desktop forcing to OS to create new ones, but that only seemed to work once. I've tried resetting Safari. (BTW, I had the same issues with Safari 3 so I'm not really too suspect of Safari 4 Beta)

I tried videos from each of the three links you provided and here are my results:
1) Heroes
a) The Fancast logo appears with a spilt second of animation, then
b) The video player opens, (a black box)
c) "Loading video..." and a white horizontal line briefly appear,
d) The video player returns to a solid black box
e) That's as far as it gets.
The router that I'm plugged into shows no further activity and the video never plays.

2) Lost & 3) Everybody Hates Chris
Everything works as advertised; video plays properly

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Jim

Thanks Jim, you're not highjacking the thread. If other people are having this problem, I want to know about it.

Reading your info, you ask "why would it be some days I can play fancast videos and other times not?" So, some days everything works fine on your PowerPC, other days no luck? Do you play the same video those days? Have you tried refreshing/reloading the browser?

Also, you say you're "having a similar problem [to Cheriann] on one of" your computers. Does that Heroes full episode play on other PCs/Macs you have? What are the specs of those machines?

Finally, I'm also curious about how found this thread. Do you come straight from google or another search engine, or did you go to getsatisfaction first and then discover this thread? This will help me plan our customer service strategy.

Thanks!
Stephen

Hi,

I also have the same problem as the previous users. I believe it started around March 23rd. I am using an imac G4 with powerPC. I use Safari 3.2.1 and Firefox 3.0.9. I have updated Adobe Flash and Shockwave, checked cookies and pop-ups. Hulu works fine, but whenever I try a Fancast video I get those colored leaves (for lack of a better description), a black box, then sometimes a "Loading video ..." message across the black box, then Nada!

I am having the exact same problem as cheriann and imacgirl. All the same symptoms, I did the same tests you suggested stephen and got the same results as cheriann. Fancast used to work great for me and it all the sudden started having the black box problem around the end of March. I have a powerPC Mac with OSX 10.4.11 and the problem occurs with both Safari and Firefox. I found this thread from google.

Thanks everyone for helping us troubleshoot these problems. I'm sorry you're having a less than stellar experience.

I have 3 follow up requests:
1) Please try playing an episode of "30 Minute Meals" (http://www.fancast.com/tv/30-Minute-M...). This show uses the Fancast player, but is not supplied by Hulu.
2) Do you have another PC/Mac you can try playing the 4 shows (Heroes, 30 Minute Meals, Lost, and Everybody Hates Chris) on? I'm trying to verify if this is limited to local machines.
3) Tell me how you found this thread on getsatisfaction.

Thanks!
S.

I have the same problem cheriann has...and none of the links you provide does anything to make it better.. When I select a video, the video area stays black and nothing loads at all. sometimes there is a flash of a message that says a video is loading, but after a few seconds, that fades, and it becomes completely black at that point. there is no menu, no video controls, no nothing. Am I doing something wrong?

I tried the 30 Minute Meals video and was unable to watch that one as well. It's just like the others where the box is there and for a few seconds tries to load but then just stays a blac box. it is just how Ron describes - it is completely black - no menu, no video controls, no nothing.

i will try watching it on another of my computers and see if the problem is there as well. i had no problem watching the videos for quite some time, and then one day, with nothing changing, the problem was there, and have had no luck watching them ever since. i'm not sure what the catalyst is in this situation.

i originally found get satisfaction because i tried googling the problem with the tag fancast problems not working. i saw this site on google, realized it was fancast support, tried to find a thread with this problem already, but could not, so i just started my own.

thanks for your help so far!

cherieann

p.s. don't know if i mentioned it before, but my machine is unfortunately a PC.

1. 30 minute meals - same problem, but no "Loading video message.
Heroes - same problem, but the "Loading video message shows
The other videos are fine.
2. Sorry, only a dinosaur mac that predates the world wide web.
3. Google. Found this thread after I found the identical problem on a Mac forum.

Did you notice that I said the problem began around March 23rd? How often do you release a "build" of the Fancast player? My guess is that you might find what broke it if you look at what changed in the player you released around then. I'm pretty sure of the approximate date, since I was home with the flu and I spent most of my time watching videos when I wasn't sleeping.

I've got the same issue. Has there been an answer to it yet?

Please, I have this same problem with Fancast. I could see the videos fine before, but only recently I haven't been able to (while I can go to Hulu and see them from there with no problem - same iMac, same browsers, Safari and Firefox). My brother's iMac and my laptop, however, can play Fancast videos just fine, so I'm wondering why it only stopped working for my computer. What changed, and why didn't it affect my laptop (which BTW I haven't done any software updates for recently - is Fancast incompatible with some kind of software update?).

Please, please, can someone answer this question or solve this problem. I've tried Yahoo Answers, and no one has even responded yet.

p.s. I found this thread via Google.

I'm also having this problem. Very similar to what others have described above. Yesterday I was having no trouble playing Fancast videos. Then later in the day when I tried to play another one, nothing happened. It's still that way today. Doesn't matter if I'm in IE or Firefox.

I'm on a PC (Dell Inspiron 6400) running Windows XP Professional Version with service pack 3. Genuine Intel CPU. 1.66 GHz 1 Gig RAM. High speed internet connection which hasn't changed from yesterday (although I don't think that has anything to do with it).

This is very frustrating as I was in the middle of a series of episodes of a show I can't find anywhere else online.

Stephen, if you're still there, please help us

Hi everyone, thanks for being patient and sorry to hear you're having problems watching some videos. When you post here, could you please copy and paste the URL of the video(s) you can't load?

Many of these issues seem to be intermittent rather than systemwide occurrences. We're thinking that most are probably due to busted ad XML our video partners (ie, the companies that supply the videos) are returning that is causing our video player to think it's playing an ad, but to the user is just an indefinite black screen.

I'm taking the different facts you've given me and we're discussing internally. I'm sorry that I don't have a silver bullet fix that can get things working immediately for you. When I have seen this a few times myself, refreshing the browser a number of times causes the video player to call a different ad (server or campaign) and bypass the bad XML, resulting in a proper video stream that you can watch.

S.

Thanks so much for the response Stephen! I didn't know where else to go.

I'm at work right now, away from my laptop. But I tried playing the video again on my desktop at work, and it played just fine. Haven't tried it on the laptop today but will do it when I get home.

The videos I've been trying to play are episodes of The Next Food Network Star. Here is the link that wasn't playing last night on my laptop but is playing today on my desktop at work:
http://www.fancast.com/tv/The-Next-Fo...

I actually tried several other videos of this show as well on the laptop last night and none of them would work.

Hope this helps!

same problem here, can't play anything, just get a short Fancast animation, then just a black box, no matter what video I select, no matter how many times I refresh, and this happens on both PC and Mac.. (found this thread via Google search for 'fancast player trouble' btw)

I'm having the same problem. I was watching next food network star yesterday just fine. Now I'm getting the notorious black screen.

I also tried other videos and the same happens.

I don't know if this helps but when i checked my firefox error log it says this when I try to load a video:Error: Permission denied to call method Location.toString

Still not working for me, no matter how many times I refresh. I've even tried uninstalling and reinstalling adobe flash player and still nothing. Any video I try to play does the same.

Has anyone figured this out yet? It's driving me bazoo! I've read a few other places online about people having this problem but haven't seen a solution yet, and fancast appears to have no customer/technical support (which is very annoying).

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to post their information in this thread, and again I apologize for your bad experience.

Please, give me the exact URL of the videos you can't play. I can escalate that for troubleshooting. "Every video I try" doesn't help an engineer pinpoint a problem.

Thanks,
Stephen

I've mainly been trying to watch The Next Food Network Star and I can't get any of their videos to play. I've tried them all with the same result, but here's the link to the most recent episode.
http://www.fancast.com/tv/The-Next-Fo...

What bizarre is that at the end of May I was watching the NFNS videos with no problem on the same computer, same setup, everything. I got through like the first 3 and then they just stopped working for me.

When I click to play it the Fancast logo comes up with the animated leaves, or whatever they are. Then the screen goes black and nothing else happens. In the box below the video screen it says the video is playing. This is the same reaction I get whenever I try to watch anything that is streamed directly from Fancast. Obviously I haven't tried every video on the site, but here's a few other links I tried out just as a test, and had the same negative result:

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Royal-Pains...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Rescue-Me/3...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Jon-%26-Kat...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Friends/835...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Burn-Notice...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Nurse-Jacki...

Pretty much anything I try that isn't ABC doesn't work. But videos that open in the ABC viewer work fine, like this:

http://www.fancast.com/tv/The-Bachelo...
Part-1/videos

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Cupid/10145...

I hope that's enough info to at least get you started.

Thanks for trying to help. This is frustrating! I"m away from home and my TV/DVR right now and I hate missing my shows!

I, too, am having this problem consistently with every video I have tried to watch. Recently that has been the Kitchen Nightmares series including:
http://www.fancast.com/tv/Kitchen-Nig...
Thank you for your attention.

hooray! today everything seems to be working, now my only question is how to switch out of enhanced view to a smaller view so the video is smoother...?

Hey! It's working for me, too! Score! (Actually it's really slow, but that's cause I've got a lousy connection at the moment). I don't know if you had anything to do with fixing this, Stephen, but if so, thank you, thank you!

Awesome. We rolled a new build to Fancast on 6/25. Let me know if you continue to see problems.

Hi Im also having a recent problem with Fancast---
Whenever I try to load a full episode of Lost- It loads to 90% and then doesnt go past 90%, then fades to black and says that the episode player can't connect to the server... I also cant view the episodes on Hulu..
Could this be a result of ABC?

this is the video i cannot play=

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Lost/93942/...

and its almost every Season 3 Lost episode

any tips?
thanks

ABC.com removed Lost seasons 2-4 from their site. We link out to those videos from Fancast, and our site has not updated yet to reflect that. Sorry, but those videos are now available. (Season 1 and 5 will work though.)

oh wow! thats terrible! haha!

thanks Stephen

I was able to watch videos (tv shows and movies) just fine yesterday. Suddenly today, I am having the same experience cherriann described above. When I click a tv episode to view, the video portal opens, but then turns black. The navigation options are not visible.
Did Fancast drop some new code to the site today? I can watch videos on Hulu without any problems.
Thanks for any help!

Oh, you need specific videos.
I can't see any episodes of the following shows:
V tv series: http://www.fancast.com/tv/V/...
Monk: http://www.fancast.com/tv/Monk/2697/1...
Fringe: http://www.fancast.com/tv/Fringe/...
Sanctuary: http://www.fancast.com/tv/Sanctuary...
Harper's Island: http://www.fancast.com/tv/Harpers-Isl....
CSI: Miami: http://www.fancast.com/tv/CSI%3A-Miam....

It truly is any tv show, movie, or movie trailer that I cannot watch today.
Thanks again.

I have the same problem as deb. After Stephen's reply from a month ago, I was able to view Fancast videos - but I just tried today, and I got the black box. The video I tested was the latest episode of Ace of Cakes. Something must have changed yesterday, but I'm hoping it can be fixed quickly.

I'm having the same problem as everyone above. It just started last night 8-23-09 at about 9 or 10. I watched an episode of Jericho. When I went back to watch another episode, I got the black window mentioned above. I noticed that my CPU was going crazy, like it was struggling to play the video, but nothing but black in the player. Now I can't watch anything on Fancast. I have tried 12 different videos.

Deb, the videos you listed play for me, I do not see a problem. Have they started working for you?

Hi Stephen, I've been checking the Fancast site every few days and I'm still unable to watch videos.

My computer is running Windows XP Pro, SP 3, I've installed all the recent security and other updates that Microsoft has pushed out to users. I'm still using IE 7, version 7.0.5730.11. (Although I often watch videos from on Mozilla FireFox or Google Chrome because the browsers are faster and more responsive than IE.)

When I click a link to watch a video, the viewer window/portal opens in the browser, but all I see is a black box.

I can watch the videos listed above on hulu or the Wb site or the SciFi channel site or cbs.com -- or whichever channel is hosting videos for the show.

Thanks for checking on the status of this issue.
deb

I have put in two requests for help to comcast, but have not received a reply. I submitted ticket #CR177388559 over a week ago and ticket #CR177973 a few days ago. I still get the black box whenever I try to watch a video. I am using Safari 3 on a MAC G4 PPC. Thanks for working on this.

I suddenly cannot watch fancast either!!! Exact same problems as everyone else! I was watching Intervention, left for about an hour, came back to resume the show and all i get is a black box.... What to do??? ... I have refreshed, opened new browser, etc, etc, nothing helps.... i found your site by plugging into google search engine, "Fancast not working" and up popped this thread.

Same exact problem . . . black box. I did notice that it happened on my Mac Power PC after it suggested that I optimize the box because it was having difficulty playing. The funny thing is it went out on Safari AND Firefox and it used to work in either. So then I switched to watching on my laptop Power Book G4 and the same thing happened . . . everything played fine . . . then it suggested that I optimize the screen and shortly after that it did the black boxed thing. If anybody figures a work around please post it I've been trying to watch episodes of Chopped.

If you are experiencing a problem, please post the URL of the video. If I can't replicate the issue, I can't help you.

Thanks!
Stephen

Sorry schininis, I wasn't able to reproduce that problem. All three episodes of Chopped played for me. (I had to refresh the page for the first one, but it started up after that)

I seem to have a similar problem with fancast that started about a week ago. I was able to view fine prior to the problem starting and I can still view videos on IMDB, HULU, and other sites. I'm running Windows 2000 Pro SP4 on an Intel 1.5Ghz processor with 261,424 KB RAM over a 1.5Mbps cable modem (served by Cox). I've tried Firefox 3.5.3 and IE 6. I'm running Flash Player Plugin 10.0.32.18 and Flash Player ActiveX 10.0.22.87.

I've tried to view the following videos on fancast with no success:

http://www.fancast.com/tv/The-A-Team/...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Eureka/6918...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Lost/93942/...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/Heroes/1200...

http://www.fancast.com/tv/30-Minute-M...

I tried picking some of the shows you mentioned above in a prior post to see if I could get different results, but no luck. I mostly just get a black box with no video. I can access the Flash controls (zoom in/out, quality, settings, etc), but that's it. Once in a while I get a message saying "Loading video...", but then it disappears. I've refreshed multiple times and waited as much as 20 minutes to see if a video will start. The only thing in particular I can think of is that the last video I started to watch realized I was having a bandwidth issue and asked if I wanted to optimize. I've seen this option before and choosing it usually does improve playback. This time, there was an additional option to have it always play in optimized mode. So, I chose to always play in optimized, and haven't been able to watch since or find a way to stop watching in optimized. I've tried clearing history and cookies, but still no luck.

It's true that I can watch many shows through other sites, but none of them have as nice a user interface as fancasts'. I'd really love to be able to watch through fancast again.

cherieann ;

That's really a typical issue for Fancast: I have noticed it mostly on Friday nights and just assumed it was from high traffic volume. Otherwise, though the video playback has always been hit or miss there, I had no real problems with Fancast until I made the mistake of creating an account.

As soon as I did that, all of the shows I usually watch came up with a "We have no full episodes of this show" message. All my shows simply disappeared!

I even tried to access Fancast from my laptop and got the same results, so it has nothing to do with my computer or cookies. I assume they are tracking my IP and blocking the content. I suspect I'll have to use one of the Proxy hacks if I want to keep using Fancast. But it's just as easy to download via torrents or newsgroups, so why bother?

Hulu still works fine; I assume because they are not in bed with ComCast, so I will just use them instead.

FanCast sucks pondwater bigtime!

I'm sorry you are having trouble, but there are no systemic issues that have been identified.

If you are continuing to have problems, please go to www.fancast.com/help, for information and ways to contact support.

Thanks!
Stephen

yeah, same here! when i checked off the box to always play in optimized, it effectively blacked out my ability to view videos. the annoying thing is that when i clicked the box, it said it has been saved under my preferences, but no such setting exists when i browse through the setting/preferences pages. if only there was some way around this...

I am and have been having the same issues i am unable to get anything but a black screen. In my case it occurs on every single video, i have check dozens over the last month or so. I am not sure but i think it started right after i switched to comcast. I have a toshiba satellite, with lastest firefox, IE and Adobe.

Those of you who have had a black screen problem, please let me know if you've "optimized" the Fancast video player. The video player offers to optimize video when it detects that a certain number of video frames are being dropped (this is usually due to constrained internet bandwidth, high CPU load, or if you have an older computer).

If you would like to remove the optimization and return to the "enhanced" video player, please click "Switch to enhanced view". This will reset the player. (see image below for reference.)

Stephen, I'm attaching a screen shot so you can see what the black screen looks like - there is no option to switch to enhanced or optimized when the black screen is there.

Stephen, your answer sounded great, but I have to agree with RT. Same here. I don't have the option to choose enhanced view. :(

I mentioned optimized view in my question on "13 days ago" (as of 9/28). I would have thought you might store that option in a cookie somewhere since I didn't have a fancast account, but after clearing all of my cookies, the problem remained. Is the setting somehow stored in a registry setting by Flash player? I'm not sure how else the setting might be stored on my PC.

I think we're onto something here. I just got mine to play by deleting the following file:
C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\WM2JM42Z\www.fancast.com\comfancastpreferences.sol

Obviously, "user name" will be your windows account name and I wouldn't be surprised if the "WM2JM42Z" folder is not the same on everyones system.

FWIW, this is on a WinXP Pro/SP3 box using both IE8 & Safari 4.0, Flash 10,0.
Now to try to get it to work on my old Mac PowerPC running MacOS 10.4.

Just tried this again: Switched to "Optimized View". As soon as you save your preferences, the "comfancastpreferences.sol" file is created. I then tried to load another video and got the infamous "black box of death". Deleted the comfancastpreferences.sol file again, hit refresh on the browser, and the video plays.

OK, I got it to work on the MacOS, but it took a little more force. I ended up deleting all comcast and fancast folders. Just typed each into Finder, and trashed the folders from there. It hadn't worked on that machine in ages. Tried a few videos and all seems to work fine. Just remember, if you inadvertently allow it to "optimize", you'll need to do these steps again. On the Windows machines, you could write a one line batch file to delete the comfancastpreferences.sol file in the future if needed.

Eureka! You've found the fix, cadcamjim! Deleting that pesky comfancastpreferences.sol file fixed my problem! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

"I'll never optimize again!"
"I'll never optimize again!"
"I'll never optimize again!"
(well, at least not save it as a preference if I do!)

Thank you cadcamjim!
I deleted comfancastpreferences.sol and now I can watch videos on Fancast again as well.

I don't know how to write batch files, but I will create a shortcut to that Macromedia sub-folder -- and whenever Fancast stops working, I'll delete the .sol file.

I haven't been able to watch videos on Fancast for over a month. This is great!
Thanks for troubleshooting the issue and finding a workaround we can use until Comcast/Fancast fixes the problem.

Thanks for being persistent and helping me identify potential issues with our video player.

I'll take the information about the shared object and black screen and see what we find.

Thanks,
Stephen

Im having trouble locating the file, Im running on windows vista and there is no :documents and settings: folder, and it seems fancast is using adobe rather than macromedia. any help would be appreciated...

I am having a similar issue- i go to play the last episode of Desperate Housewives, and i get a message saying a common video plug-in ABC uses is missing, I go to download it, accept the license terms, I get to a screen that says in a black box

"Instructions for Mac Users
We have detected that your version of the plug-in is out of date. Please wait a moment while an updated version of our video player plugin loads. When it finishes, playback will start automatically..."

From that point, NOTHING HAPPENS! Very frustrating.

Helena, this may be a similar symptom, but the cause is not related.

ABC videos are not actually on Fancast nor use our video player. We link out to ABC's website and their player for all their content, including Desperate Housewives. That's why when you click an episode of DH on Fancast, you'll see the message below in our player "Opens in a new window", alerting you that a new browser window at ABC.com will be opening.

FYI, ABC's player uses a plugin from Move Networks. You should contact ABC at http://abc.go.com/vp2/help, if you are having problems with their content.

Thanks,
Stephen

Hi Everyone.

Our engineers have identified the problem with the optimized video player and are working on fixing the bug.

In the meantime, I have an easy workaround for this problem.

1) Go to this site:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/doc...

There’s a little widget looking thing in the middle of this page called the Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager. The list of websites is within it, under “visited websites”.

2) Find fancast.com in the list of web sites and delete it.

3) Return to the video page and refresh. The video player will no longer be “optimized”.

Thanks for helping us identify the problem,
Stephen

hii i am haveing prob's wit fancast. when i was trying to watch Ugly Betty. it show a little box so i clicked it and it told me to download somethen. but i forgot what i downloaded, because it missed my computer up. and if u could till me what it was. i can uninstall it to fix my compter

th pictuer u put up. that what i keep geten. and it told me to download somethen so i did

thxs so much:) i fixed my laptop:)

all i keep getting is a message that says sorry this video is unavailbe on any thing i try to watch and there newly posted episodes house and familyguy and i have tred older video that i have already watch and it still shows me the message and it state to re freash the page but it doesnt work ihave try with all of them