I’m trying to live Flash-free on my desktop. In Part 1, I got YouTube and Vimeo working (although the addon I use to make YouTube work seems to make the player bigger than the video sometimes).

The Flash-based Vidyo doesn’t work, of course. When using Vidyo (which Mozilla uses quite a lot), I need to use the Vidyo client. This is not free software, so I’m trying to avoid installing that on my main machine too. Instead, at home, I have a tablet which I use almost exclusively for Vidyo. That’s fine (and also allows me to see and type on my main machine at the same time), but it doesn’t work when I’m on the road, as I was quite a bit in December. So I had to scramble to find some other machine or room with Vidyo support.

I can’t watch Air Mozilla streams live very easily. There are rumours of changes in the works, but for now AirMo live streaming requires Flash. And Flash seems not to be working in Firefox or the stock browser on my tablet, although it is installed. The only workaround is (ironically) if it’s also connected to a Vidyo room, when I can join that. But because Vidyo have not yet implemented our long-open feature request to allow rooms to have participants muted automatically when joining, doing that leads to everyone hearing a “ping!” and getting a brief flash of my face. Which is not ideal.

Some things, I can watch later – AirMo’s archived streaming uses HTML5. But if I want to interact with the presenter or the audience, that’s not an option.

Video doesn’t work on the BBC either, and I’ve not figured out how to make that work yet. The mobile site does UA sniffing to keep out desktop browsers; if you spoof, you can see it, but video won’t play (perhaps it’s using some mobile-OS-specific mechanism). Any ideas welcome.