Troubleshooting
Use the following information to help you solve any video playback problems you may encounter. The information below will be useful for your IT department or if you need to request technical support from GoSkills.
Test videos
If both videos below play correctly, your browser would appear to be functioning correctly. If you have issues playing a particular video, please try refreshing the page and/or trying another browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox). You may also be experiencing a slow internet connection.
If the left video below fails to play, but the right succeeds, the browser, player and GoSkills website are all functioning correctly. The left video failing to play is a sign that your computer or network may be blocked from accessing our content delivery network (CDN).
The solution is to configure your computer or network to be allowed to receive content from the CDN. This may require the assistance of your IT department if you have one. The whitelist entry required is: *.goskills.com.
If both videos below fail to play, your browser is having issues with the player. Use the information below the videos to troubleshoot browser issues.
Video player test (CDN)
Video player test (GoSkills)
Tests
Below are some simple tests to check your browser/computer for video playback issues.
| Test | Result | Description |
|---|---|---|
| HTML5 video support | HTML5 is the preferred video playback mechanism. | |
| Video player test (CDN) | Above, left. A quick video test using our standard video distribution network. If this video fails to play, your computer or network may be blocked from accessing our content delivery network (CDN). The whitelist entry required is: *.goskills.com. | |
| Video player test (GoSkills) | Above, right. A quick video test from our own storage. If this video fails to play, your browser is having issues with the player and/or video format. |
Other information
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Browser |
Common problems and solutions
Switch browsers
Browsers have different levels of support for playing videos and sometimes work well on one computer but not on another due to a particular hardware or software configuration. For this reason, simply switching to a different browser will often resolve any issues, e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari.
Ad blockers
Ad blockers can accidentally block loading of some of our videos that they guess to be ads. In particular this may occur in marketing courses where you are learning about advertising or related terms, though it can happen to any course. We will never show third party ads on GoSkills, so you can safely disable your ad blocker on www.goskills.com by clicking on your ad block extension icon in your browser, and changing it to “off” on goskills.com, or “disable on this website.” If you know you have an ad blocker but cannot find this setting, contact us and we’ll help you out.
Hardware acceleration
Browsers will sometimes use “hardware acceleration” (also known as “GPU rendering”) to play the video, otherwise they will use “software rendering”. One or the other sometimes doesn’t work well and so sometimes you can get the video working by switching this on or off. Find out how...
Note: if changing a setting as described below does not fix the problem, please set it back again.
Chrome
- Click
in the top right and choose Settings - Click “Show advanced settings…”
- Scroll down to the bottom and un-tick “Use hardware acceleration when available”
- Click the little link in “(requires Chrome restart)” that appears beside it
Firefox for Windows
- Click in the top right
- Go to the Options menu and then click Options again
- Click the Advanced tab at the top, then General below that
- Untick “Use hardware acceleration when available”
- Click OK and restart Firefox
Internet Explorer
- Click
, or the Tools menu - Choose Internet Options
- Select the Advanced tab
- Tick the box under Accelerated Graphics that reads “Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering”
- Click Apply, then click OK
- Restart Internet Explorer
Flash
Please refer to https://forums.adobe.com/thread/891337
Firewall / corporate network problems
If the left video below fails to play, but the right succeeds, the browser, player and GoSkills website are all functioning correctly. The left video failing to play is a sign that your computer or network may be blocked from accessing our content delivery network (CDN).
The solution is usually to configure your computer or network to be allowed to receive content from the CDN. This may require the assistance of your IT department if you have one. The whitelist entry required is: *.goskills.com.
Corporate anti-virus services, either at the proxy / firewall or on the desktop, may also be configured to block content, preventing videos from playing.
Audio problems
Sometimes computer audio devices stop working. If this is the case you won’t hear any audio in any application on your computer at all. This is often fixed by simply restarting your computer, but if this does not work, please contact your IT support or computer store for assistance.
Does this YouTube video play sound? If it does, the problem is more likely to do with the video player in your browser. Switching browser might help.
If the problem is just in Internet Explorer, try going to Tools (or click the gear icon in the top right), Internet Options, Advanced and scroll down to Multimedia, then make sure "Play sounds on webpages" is ticked and click OK.
Still having trouble?
If you are still having video playback issues after ensuring you have an HTML5 video supporting browser or the latest version of Flash installed, please don’t hesitate to contact us, and we’ll do our best to help you solve any video playback issues.
What was your solution?
If your player issue was resolved some other way, please tell us about it so that we can help others.