What can you do if you want to play a video at Facebook, only to be greeted with the message “Flash Player upgrade required You must download and install the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player to view this content”. Facebook users can add videos to their status updates, and everyone who has access to the wall postings of that user is able to watch videos directly on that page, providing that they have a recent version of Adobe’s Flash Player installed.

Flash Player? Yes that is right. To stream videos to Facebook users, Facebook uses Flash technology. If Flash is not installed, the above message is displayed. Users will even receive the upgrade message if they have not installed Flash at all.

The button leads directly to the Adobe Flash page where Flash can be downloaded and installed. Here are a few pointers to make the process as easy as possible.

First, we need to find out which Flash version is installed, if any. To do that visit the Mozilla Plug-In Check website. The check will scan all installed browser plugins (of which Flash is one) and display them in a list on the page. If you see Adobe Flash in the list take a look at the version of the plugin. It is likely that the version is not the latest one, as the video would likely be playing otherwise on Facebook.

To download the latest version of Adobe Flash, visit Adobe’s official download site and follow the onscreen instructions. Once installed go back to the Facebook page where the video was posted to see if it is playing now. If it is congratulations, if it is not it has to be something else related to the plugin.

Another option you have is to clear the cache of the browser, to make sure all contents are downloaded from the Facebook page, and not from the local drive. To clear the cache follow the browser maintenance instructions at Loginhelper.com.

Upgrading Flash to the latest version and clearing the browser cache should do it in 99.9% of all cases where videos cannot be played on Facebook and the message Flash Player upgrade required is displayed. Please let us know if you have solved the video playback issue and what you did to solve it.

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