NBC Olympics Streaming Problem On Linux Solved!

For most of my usual blog readers this will be obscure gobbledygook. Feel free to move on.

If you’re trying to stream the Olympics and find yourself stuck at the authentication page it’s because your system doesn’t have the software necessary to protect NBC’s video. Easily cured! Though the streaming is done via conventional Flash technology,

A missing Ubuntu HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) module, which is not installed by default, causes this behavior. – Source Adobe

For Ubuntu open a terminal and

sudo apt-get install hal

After the “libhal” (HAL) library install completes, close the browser and clear the Adobe Access directories by executing the following shell commands:

cd ~/.adobe/Flash_Player
rm -rf NativeCache AssetCache APSPrivateData2

For Suse and other Linux distros head here.

This took about two minutes on my Ubuntu laptop and now works perfectly.

You’re welcome.

11 thoughts on “NBC Olympics Streaming Problem On Linux Solved!”

  1. I just wanted to say thank you. Luckily I have a version of Windows still on my computer, but I feel a lot better when I can stay on Linux. So thank you, thank you, thank you for allowing me to watch the Olympics legally and in an easy manner on Linux.

  2. Thanks for the post, but it doesn’t work for me. Same bouncing back to AT&T problem as before installing HAL. (Tried killing Flash multiple times and re-removing those directories to no avail.)

  3. Thank you. Confirmed it works on my Kubuntu 12.04 distro as well. How did you troubleshoot this issue? What logs were you looking at to diagnose the problem?

  4. I was having this problem on ubuntu 10.04. I am not certain buy I believe I fixed it by doing: ‘rm -rf ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects’. I already had hal installed. Also if you are using a script blocking program like NoScript, be sure you are allowing the necessary scripts (it might be easiest to allow all).

  5. Thank you, thank you, thank you! This also allows me to watch CNN live, and I’ve been looking since last year for a way to make that happen.

  6. Geoff, where on Earth did you find this fix??? I am tweeting this link immediately! As a fellow CT resident I knew I liked you but now that I know you are also a fellow Ubuntu evangelist, you are my hero! THANK YOU! 😀

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