After working for years, videos in my Flex Application won't play, just "buffering"

Question

An application I wrote for a client almost 2 years ago using Flex 2 has stopped playing the .flv videos. It's been nearly 9 months since I've had to perform any updates to the app, so I don't have the source code on the computer I'm using at the moment. I'm not sure how often the client uses the application, so I can't say exactly when this started.

The videos just displays a black screen, does not load the first frame. I believe I used standard VideoDisplay object. The videos are contained in a folder on the same shared account as the application.

I've checked the application in latest versions of IE, Firefox and Chrome (running Flash 10) and I've also fired up a virtual machine to test it out in IE 7 with various releases of Flash 9 instead of Flash 10.

I checked, and the videos are still present, and I scattered some extra no-security cross-domain files around... but to no avail.

Does anyone have an ideas as to where I should start looking when I get back to my development computer? Could a change on the hosted server cause this?

---

UPDATE: I remembered another application with video that I had on the site that was made more recently using Flex 2. This application is a simple shell VideoDisplay object that serves up a .flv file in the same directory... and it works just fine.

So, the server is serving .flv files. The application I'm having problems with pulls .flv files from a different folder that is at the same level of the applications parent folder (the only difference I can see right now).

Answer 1

You said the videos are still present, but are the being served?

A small hosting configuration change might cause files to no longer be served.

I would start there, you rule out that both your swf, and flv are accessible by the client browsers..

Answer 2

If it's on a new server, make sure it's serving the right mime type for .flv files, video/x-flv. I've had flash refuse to play videos without that set. Also, IIS now gives bogus 404 errors on requests to files of unknown mime type, so files can be on the servers, but invisible to clients. http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/rymoore/adding-flv-mime-type-in-iis-4198

Answer 3

The someone cryptic error message received when using the debugging version of the Flash player was:

Error: 1000: No bitrate match
    at mx.controls.videoClasses::VideoPlayer/play()

After getting back to my development machine I was able to determine that the XML file containing the URLs of the videos showed an old variant of the domain name that was in use a couple of years ago. This domain name was just allowed to expire, and so, the video player was pointing to .flv filenames no longer existed. Correcting the domain name resolved the problem.