SOLVED Flash Video in Windows 8

[JeremyCT]

I'm having some trouble with Flash Player in Windows 8, particularly on ESPN's website.

Firefox (stable and Aurora): I click play, the screen window changes slightly, the play tools appear (Play, Pause, etc), and it seems to start to buffer, then everything stops and nothing happens from there.

Chrome: I click play, the pre-content ad plays, then I get "CONTENT UNVAILABLE The requested bitrate is not currently available".

IE: Works properly sometimes. Sometimes I get the content bitrate error after an ad that plays twice in a row.

I just re-installed Windows 8 onto a larger partition (starting from scratch) as the partition I had it on initially was too small. I remember this working properly before, I'm at a bit of a loss for why it doesn't now. Each browser is running it's own most current version of the Flash Player. Other sites that use Flash video seem to work fine, it's just ESPN's that doesn't. Which sucks for me, because I that's where I'm most likely to watch Flash videos.

I'm a bit unsure about where to start with this one. Google didn't yield any insights. Any ideas?

 

[JeremyCT]

Well that's strange. After trying all manner of fixes, including uninstall/reinstall of Flash Player, clearing any and all caches I could think of, reboots, etc it just randomly started working today.

The only system level change I can think of is I installed the official Realtek audio driver software earlier today instead of the stock Win8 driver, but I'm not sure how likely that was to have been the source of the issue. I sort of wish I knew what fixed it, but I'm just happy it seems to be working now.

 

[Mario1]

Glad to hear you've solved the problem. Please mark the thread as solved.

 

[JeremyCT]

Glad to hear you've solved the problem. Please mark the thread as solved.

I considering doing that earlier, but was afraid to as I feared it would make the bad juju come back and haunt my sports videos again.

Not that I'm superstitious when something that didn't work starts working for reasons I can't ascertain or anything.