The Internet is filled with support requests of Facebook users who cannot play videos on the popular social networking site. This guide takes a look at some of the more common problems associated with playback problems of videos on Facebook, offering quick and easy solutions for those.

The most important fact that Facebook users need to know is that Facebook uses Adobe Flash to show and play videos on their website. The most common problems therefor are linked to Adobe Flash.

To begin, users should visit the official Adobe website to check if the Flash Player is properly installed on their system and their web browser.

flash player version

The page checks if the Flash Player plugin is running in the browser. The next step is to verify that the Flash player version is the latest version released by Adobe. To do that, users need to compare the version displayed on the first page, with the version displayed on the Get Flash Player page.

Most video playing problems on Facebook are related to Flash Player. What makes matters worse is that Flash needs to be installed differently, depending on the browser used. For Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, it has to be installed like any other Windows application. For Firefox and Opera, it has to be installed as a browser plugin, and for Chrome, it is already included.

A good option therefor is to check if the video is playing in another browser. The best browser for that is Google Chrome, due to the fact that Flash comes preinstalled in it. Just download the browser and visit Facebook afterwards.

Log into your Facebook account and load a page containing a video. If that plays properly, it is likely a Flash player conflict in the other browser. Either that no Flash Player is installed at all, that it is disabled or corrupt.

A good idea then is to uninstall all Adobe Flash installations and restart the computer, before installing Flash again. This should fix the videos not working problems on Facebook. Alternatively, it is possible to simply use a browser where videos play properly.

To sum it up to this point:

• Make sure that the latest version of Adobe Flash is installed and activated in the web browser.
• If not, download and install the latest version, or test video playback with another browser first.

Another option is to take a closer look at the error message displayed. Is it showing “Video disabled by YouTube”, “unavailable” or “disabled by YouTube” or something similar? This can be an indication that the video itself has been disabled, deleted or blocked by the video hosting service. A good option then is to find another video on Facebook to verify the findings. If that video plays then videos are working properly on Facebook.

Another common problem why videos are not working on Facebook is third party software that interacts with the video stream, for instance another browser plugin or software that tries to speed up the delivery of the video to the local PC. It is a good idea to disable those temporarily to make sure that they are not the cause for Facebook videos not working.

You may also want to clear the web browser cache, to remove any local copies on the computer. This forces the browser to retrieve the video information again from the source. It sometimes happens that corrupt copies are stored locally, and clearing the cache resolves those issues.

Take a look at web browser maintenance for instructions on how to do that.

Finally, if you are stuck, you should research the exact error message to see if other users are experiencing similar problems. Chance is, they are with Facebook’s 500+ million users.

Some might want to do so on the other hand for various reasons. Facebook Video is a Firefox add-on that is currently in experimental stage that can be used to download, convert or embed videos from Facebook.

The add-on adds a few new options to video pages, wall and inbox. It does that in a very unobtrusive way and the new elements look like they have been there all the time. Video pages will contain links beneath the videos to download a video from Facebook to the computer or to convert the video from flv format at Zamzar before downloading it. The very same pages display the embed code to embed videos outside of Facebook and the public link to the video to send to contacts.

The Wall and Inbox on the other hand will contain options to download, convert or embed only. Facebook Video is not the only Firefox add-on that can download those videos from Facebook. Download Helper is another add-on that supports Facebook and hundreds of other websites. It can be downloaded without having to log into the Mozilla page which users would have to do for the Facebook Video add-on because of its experimental stage.

Facebook Video was developed as a userscript for Greasemonkey first which can also be downloaded and used. This is noteworthy because these scripts can usually be added to other web browsers like Opera or Internet Explorer as well.

Update: The Facebook Video Downloader for Firefox is no longer available at the official Mozilla Add-on repository. I suggest you use the excellent Download Helper extension instead which is linked in this article as well.