Chrome not playing video from Nest cameras?

If you have a Nest camera (formerly Dropcam) that you use for live streaming, you may have noticed recently that Chrome won’t play the live stream any more, giving you an error about how “no compatible source was found for this media”. Our construction camera’s feed is embedded below; if you see video playing, or even a still image, then you’re probably not affected. But if you see a black box with an X in the middle, you’ve been hit by this.

I think what happened is that Chrome changed its default behavior for Adobe Flash content. I think it used to automatically play any Flash content, unless you’d changed its default settings to have it ask you each time. And now it looks like it’s defaulting to asking each time, unless you’ve changed the setting to “always play”, or added an exception for a site.

Unfortunately, Nest’s live streaming doesn’t work with pure HTML5 video, so they use a Flash player for that. And something about their player loader (Video.js) is detecting that Flash isn’t playing automatically, and rather than loading the Flash player anyway, triggering the ability in Chrome for you to play it manually, it’s loading the HTML5 player, which can’t load the stream.

If you want to see live streams from Nest cameras in Chrome, here’s what to do:

Click on the three vertical dots in the upper right hand corner to open the menu, and select “Settings”. At the bottom of the settings page, click on “Show advanced settings”. That will reveal some more options, one of which is a “Privacy” section. In that section, click on “Content settings”. Scroll down to the “Flash” section and click “Manage exceptions”. Enter the following in the text input box at the bottom:

[*.]nest.com

Make sure the drop-down option to the right is set to “Allow”, and click “Done”. Click “Done” again, then close the settings tab. If you reload the page with an embedded video stream, it should now play.

If you’re using Microsoft’s new “Edge” browser, you probably aren’t seeing any live streams either. Luckily, Edge has a way of opening pages in Internet Explorer when it’s not up to the task: