Youtube not working with Lion as guest OS

J

JohnSmithers

Bit poster
Using a perfectly fresh install of Lion with Parallels 7, with nothing additional installed other than Flash, I cannot get YouTube videos to play at all (tried Safari and Firefox). I simply get black and white flashes when the video tries to play. Video from other sites (ie. Vimeo) plays fine, flash ads and flash games play fine, even the video advertising on YouTube works fine, it's just actual YouTube videos that will not play. I've tried reinstalling to no effect.

Is this an issue for anyone else? I was intending to use this VM as a testbed for a YouTube-integrated app but this issue has made Parallels worthless to me. The sooner I can get this working, the better.
 
Hello JohnSmithers!

I advice you to check youtube with chrome. It has internal flash plugin. So it should work fine.

Please post here if it'll help.

Good luck!
 
Unfortunately my app works with Firefox, so whether or not I can get YouTube working with Chrome's built in Flash is irrelevant.
 
One way I have gotten Safari to play YouTube videos is to run Safari in 32-bit mode. You can enable 32-bit mode through the get info window. Unfortunately, this procedure does not seem to work with Firefox.
 
The only possible reason for Flash, in a VM, to work with everything except videos on Youtube is the GPU accelerated decoding of H.264 in Flash.

So, this is probably a problem with Parallel Tools on Lion VM, because Flash must be 'think' the GPU presented to it is supported for video decoding. The question is, is this feature supposed to be supported by Parallels Tools and is not working?

Have you tried 'playing' with the video settings of the VM configuration? Like enable/disable 3d accel., increase video memory?

If that doesn't solve it then disable hardware acceleration in Flash, here's how to do it (the link is related to some other software but the procedure is the same): http://www.alaskavrtours.com/flash-bug.php
 
Confirmed bug

I am having the same problem. Youtube is broken in Safari, Firefox and Chrome when Lion is the guest OS.

I also started from a clean install of Lion.

The symptoms are different for each browser:
Safari - The video area is black with occasional white flashes, but audio plays properly. Playback controls are visible and work properly. Overlaid ads appear, and related videos appear when audio finishes.
Chrome - The entire player area, including controls, is transparent. I can see through the browser window and see the windows open behind Chrome. Scrolling the browser window allows me to see different parts of the background windows and desktop that should be obscured. Audio plays properly. Clicking in the transparent area starts and stops the audio.
Firefox - The entire player area, including controls, is invisible. In its place, I see the off-white background of the web page. Audio plays properly, however. Clicking in the invisible player area does not do anything.

Version info:
Parallels Build 7.0.15054 (Revision 722853; December 16, 2011)
Host: Mac OS X 10.7.2, 2x2.4Ghz Core i5 w/Hyperthreading, 8GB RAM, all updates installed as of 29 Jan 2012.
Guest: Mac OS X 10.7.2, 1x2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, all updates installed as of 29 Jan 2012.
Safari 5.1.2
Firefox 9.0.1
Chrome 16.0.912.77
Flash 11.1.102.55

Attached is my hand-typed test log. I was actually trying to reproduce a certain crash in Safari, but failed to do so. I noticed the Youtube problem near the end of the test.
 

Attachments

Last edited:
Have you tried the work around I suggested of disabling hardware acceleration in flash? Ether this works or not might be important in finding the cause.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Your workaround (of disabling Flash hardware acceleration) worked for me in Safari and Chrome, but incompletely in Firefox.

At first, Firefox behavior seemed the same as before, where I could only see the page background where the player was supposed to be, and clicking yielded no response. However, by choosing "Show video info" from the right-click menu, I was able to get clicks to work in pausing and playing the audio (this works whether HW accel is disabled or not). After that, I could double-click to go into fullscreen mode, and the video played normally. Using the controls from there to switch to the small or large player sizes exited fullscreen mode, but made the player area disappear, revealing the page background.

More details in the attached, updated test log. I made six test runs of different configurations, varying three variables:
1) Flash hardware acceleration
2) Parallels 3D acceleration
3) Parallels video ram (32MB is the default; I increased it 128MB for tests 5 and 6)
 

Attachments

Weird that it works for the other browsers except Firefox, I wonder if it's related to cache. From my understanding of how flash works it's the same binary (flash) in all browsers that runs inside the browser window, so the behaviour should be the same.

Besides that oddity, like I predicted the problem has to do with GPU acceleration of video decoding present in newer versions of flash. I assume Flash queries the system for what GPU the system has and if it's in its list of supported GPUs it starts 'talking' to it, obviously Parallels GPU driver is identifying itself by the same name as the real hardware, but it isn't capable of dealing with video decoding.

For me, this is a bug in Parallels Tools for OSX, specifically the GPU driver.
 
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