Video Help
Having trouble viewing our videos? Here are some troubleshooting steps:
- Many problems are caused by ad blockers.
Our video player includes ads. If an ad blocking program blocks our player from loading the ads, the player may not finish loading. If you're having trouble playing our videos and are running an ad blocker, try turning it off and checking if the video plays. If it does, that's the problem, and we suggest disabling the ad blocker from running on our site entirely. Without the ads, we can't pay our staff and writers, the people who star in the videos, or for the bandwidth to stream them to you. For those reasons, we will not offer further assistance in getting our videos to play to anyone running an ad blocker. - Noscript can cause playback issues
This is another common one. We use Javascript quite a bit here, and disabling scripts can cause some strange problems. Here is a list of domains that host scripts that are important for our site functionality and video playback: escapistmagazine.com, warcry.com, themis-media.com, googleapis.com, and liverail.com. There may be other scripts loaded by ad units or for analytics, but those are not necessary for the site to work properly, and should be safe to disable. - Make sure you have the latest version of your web browser
We test our player in the latest versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on both Windows (XP and Vista) and OSX. We generally do not test or support other browsers, whether that be older versions, beta versions, other operating systems, or other browsers entirely. If you're having trouble, we suggest getting the latest release version of Firefox.
Please note that we can't support video playback on mobile devices or consoles at this time. Flash is not fully-featured on those platforms, and may not support the functionality needed for our player to work. - Make sure you have the latest version of the Flash Player
You can download the latest version directly from Adobe at their Install Adobe Flash Player page. If you aren't sure what version you have, you can check here. Installing the latest version tends to help with any playback problems you might be having. Please note that you'll need to have at least version 9.0.115 for our videos to work. - Check your DNS
If you're getting "Stream not found" errors, that means your computer can't connect to the video files, which are hosted elsewhere. This seems to happen the most for people in New Zealand and Australia, and often indicates a DNS problem for an entire area or ISP. If this is happening to you, you might want to try DNS Advantage or OpenDNS to see if this fixes the problem. - Disable Media Servers
We only support viewing our videos through our Flash player, except in cases where we provide a podcast feed. If you're running a program to crawl our site or directly download our videos you may get identified as a bot, and no longer be able to play our videos at all. Please don't do this. - Restart your browser
If you find that the video is playing, but it's skipping or stuttering, you may need to restart your browser (or in extreme cases, your PC). Flash does not currently support hardware-accelerated video playback, so video performance is very dependent on your CPU and available memory. A memory leak in your browser or many other programs running can cause playback problems. It has been reported that this will be improved in a future Flash release. - Delete any old cookies
We use web cookies to save information about your session, but occasionally the cookies can get corrupted for various reasons. In your web browser, try deleting any cookies for the following domains: escapistmagazine.com, warcry.com, themis-group.com, liverail.com, and castfire.com. Then, restart your web browser and see if the videos will load. Also, make sure you aren't blocking any new cookies from any of these domains, as that may cause issues as well. - Find out if your ISP can connect
Internet service providers are usually great about working with their customers to make sure any issues aren't with their local connection. Call up your ISP and ask them if they are able to load our videos, and if they can help figure out why you may not be able to. If they can't play the video, then please have them get in touch with us and we can work with them to troubleshoot the issue. - Clear your Flash player's cache
One last resort is clearing out old data cached by the Flash player. You can do this by going to the website storage settings panel and clicking the "Delete all sites" button. Unfortunately there's no easy way to search through this list of sites due to it being unsorted, and some content delivery networks may obscure our site names. But it's worth a shot as a last resort. - Let us know
Finally, if you have checked all of the above, please contact us with the following information and we'll try to help:- Your OS and browser version.
- Your ISP and general location in the world.
- Any browser add-ons, firewalls, or other internet security software you are running.
- Is the problem happening with multiple different browsers on the same computer?
- If there is another computer available, are you having the same problem on that one?
- Are any nearby friends, or school/work computers, having (or not having) the same problem?
- Can you run a traceroute to www.escapistmagazine.com, serve.castfire.com, and static.liverail.com?
- If possible, a screenshot of the problem. If there are error messages, one that shows them is best.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Can I post your video on my site?
Definitely! You can use the embed code in our player to post it anywhere that supports video embeds. - Do you have an RSS feed?
Yes we do. Our RSS feeds are embedded into our page headers, and any modern browser should be able to find them. For more information, and a list of feeds, see our RSS page. Please note that our RSS feeds are intended for news readers, we do not currently support video podcast feeds. - You should review _____! / You should do a show about _____!
If you have suggestions, or if you have a product you'd like us to cover, please let us know using either the contact emails within our videos, or through our contact form. - Who controls the content of the videos?
The video creator(s), with some feedback from our editors, determine the subject matter and content. Some shows, like The Escapist Show, are produced entirely by the Escapist staff. - Do advertisers impact the videos?
Nope. The advertising on our sites and in the videos is independent of the content. Our editors usually don't even know what will be advertised at any given time, and our writers and video creaters never do. - I have an idea for a video series.
You're welcome to contact us if you're interested in having us publish your video. We generally require at least one sample video for consideration. - Can I download your video to my computer/iPod/Zune/_____?
Although there are ways to download .flv movies from flash players, this is not something we encourage or support. Some video series have podcasts, which you can find on the view page if they're available - if it's not listed, we don't have one for that series yet. - Can I upload your video to YouTube/_____?
Absolutely not - any reproduction of our content is forbidden without our express written consent. If you'd like to discuss alternate/additional publishing arrangements, please feel free to Contact Us. Please note that we will send takedown requests to any services or web hosts we find with a copy of our content. - I don't like your player. Why don't you just use YouTube/_____?
The reason we're able to provide original video is because we pay our content creators (writers and video creators). In order to cover that cost, and make sure we can keep doing it, we run ads on our pages and in the videos themselves. To do this, we can't use a free video service.
