Ok so I can watch videos on youtube just fine, some other streaming video sites work ok too. The odd thing is that a certain few sites just refuse to play on any browser on my main PC.

Right now I'm trying to watch a tv show on fixplay, Firefox won't play it, nor will Safari, Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer. Rather odd that IE won't play it, considering it uses silverlight to play the videos.

Here comes the really strange part, I can play the video just fine on my macbook using Safari and the osx silverlight plugin so my connection to the server is fine.

My hosts file contains nought but localhost entries and obviously IE has no adblocking capabilities. Both computers connect to the internet through the same router so there's no issue there so it has to be my main PC.

The issue doesn't only affect silverlight videos though, some of those youtube clone sites refuse to work as well and they use flash to play the videos so if there was a problem with flash I would expect all flash based sites to fail, not just one or two.

On what may or may not be an unrelated note, sometimes embedded videos on this very forum just won't display either, yet the streaming videos on ausgamers work.

Ideas?

No. Some sites, the player won't show up at all and others, like fixplay, tell me the video is unavailable at this time. Yet on my macbook, the video is available and plays just fine.

You have version 10,1,102,64 installed

Hard to say when it started happening, but it's been going for at least a few months now.

Oh and while it's probably clear in the OP I'm on windows, I forgot to mention it's 32bit windows 7

It's not just flash though, silverlight doesn't work either.

what, all 4 of them?

I've always done that craka, easy to close the lid when someone comes along. Trouble is now everyone knows I browse for porn on it, when I watch a normal TV show on it everyone just assumes I'm watching porn. I'm starting to get self conscious.

Is there some way that adblock for firefox could somehow be doing something that affects the entire computer? It does add a bunch of generic rules but they're only limited to firefox aren't they? It doesn't actually affect the "internet zone" of the connections thing in IE?

edit: Ok, I've solved the fixplay issue. I had to open the silverlight preferences and enable the download of components needed to play DRM content. Guess I must have disabled that at some time or another.

That just leaves the youtube clones + this forum which I'm guessing are embedded flash players.