Sheer panic

You might know the feeling. You’ve got a flight, 2+ hours. You’ve prepared and uploaded a bunch of ripped DVDs to your tablet, at least one or two of which you’ll watch during the flight. You pop your headphones on as the doors are closed and you start the first video.

“Cannot play video. Please try again later.”

Yes, this was me on Monday morning, my heart sinking into my boots. All I had, literally, for this flight to entertain myself were these videos. And they wouldn’t play.

Maybe I’d overloaded the storage on the device? After all, I had less than 10% of storage free, maybe that’s the issue. I deleted a couple. Nope. No WiFi on the flight either – it was a tiny Canadair regional jet – so I couldn’t do any research or download some other “approved” video. This all had worked perfectly only three weeks before on my previous trip, and on every trip prior to that all the way back to when I originally bought this Kindle Fire HDX (which is now on Fire OS 4.5.5.2, from last August).

Once I got to my destination, I did some googling, but all I could find were issues from 4 or 5 years ago. And even those didn’t help.

But then, I noticed that as soon as I turned on the WiFi on the device and it connected, it would play these videos with no problem. Was there some new weird DRM checking going on? Turn the WiFi off, it would still play. If I turned the device off and then back on again, videos wouldn’t play until I reconnected to the internet.

In the end, I just gave up. I installed a third-party video player on the device (MX Player) and it works perfectly every time, WiFi or no WiFi. I still don’t understand what the issue is with the built-in player but, at this stage, I don’t particularly want to spend more time in experimenting and finding out.

Banner image cropped from: Don't Panic, by fotologic, on flickr.

Now playing:
Orquestra Was - Excuse Me, Colonel. Could I Borrow Your Newspaper?
(from Forever's a Long Long Time)

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