I am getting a little crazy from my browsers. I keep running into things I don’t understand and it is really frustrating when I can’t get a live stream or something else that is time-critical to work. I don’t know if the problem is with the site, or the geo-unblocker, or a browser setting, or whatever. My streaming tends not to be limited to just three or four SVOD sites, but to several sites scattered around the world. Here are some examples I would really like to find explanations for:

First is the JW Player, which more and more sites seem to be using. It doesn’t work well for me, though recently it has improved. One complaint is that it always falls back to Flash even when I am using an HTML5 capable browser like Opera. The only way I have found to get around this is to use separate browsers, one without Flash installed (which forces HTML5 if the site is capable) and another with Flash. This seems a bit silly, but at least it works. Until recently, there was some mysterious problem with the player on the classical tv site. Flash wouldn’t work at all (endless spinning circle) and HTML5 wouldn’t go full-screen. This kind of thing gets very tiresome.

My browsers are all Chrome-based. I have tried Firefox and others and I just don’t like them. Even with different Chrome browsers, I keep running into weird crap. For a long time I mainly used Slimjet because I liked some of its features. Then Opera improved and I switched to that for HTML5. I now only use Slimjet for sites that still insist on Flash. I don’t like Google Chrome at all and have only used it for tests.

Even with Opera and Slimjet, some sites don’t work at all and I cannot figure out why. BVN, a Dutch site, won’t load with either. I get an error message that there is a fault getting my location data. I have repeatedly checked both browser settings and they seem fine. They also work with every other site I have tried. Also, neither one works when I try to play one particular video on another Dutch site. Other videos on the same page play normally but one won’t play at all. It loads properly and I can see different frames by moving the slider forward, but nothing will make it play. Yet it plays fine with Vivaldi, which also works fine with BVN, which gives the location error with the other two browsers. However Vivaldi lacks some functions the other browsers have so now I need at least three browsers to stream the sites I want to.

And not even any of the three would work when I was trying to live stream from NPO.NL earlier. Videos on the NPO pages played fine, and as far as I could tell the live streams appeared to be available, but all I could get on any browser was a blank white window. No errors, no spinning wheels, no information of any kind, just a big blank. So how do I diagnose something like that? I’m not sure even where to start.

Apologies for the wall of text. I don’t know how to explain all this otherwise. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.