Before doing an update on my media machine, I wanted to see if anything had channged at the MotoGP site this week. It turns out that it has not. Vivaldi-stable could view videos, but without sound, and vivaldi-snapshot played them just fine, with great audio.
Then I checked to see whether there were any important races this weekend that I'd hate missing. And there aren't. No new MotoGP, no new World Superbikes, no new Formula 1. There is a new event at RoadAmerica (the American Motorcycle Association series), but I can wait to watch those, so I'll go ahead and update that media machine as well. I'm hoping it won't take more than another week to solve this.
But first, I wanted to do a bit more testing. As before, it seems the only site that fails for vivaldi-stable is MotoGP. It handles races from the AMA session just fine. By now, I'm thinking there's something different about MotoGP's videos that gives vivaldi-stable a hard time.
So, nothing seems to have changed with any of the sites, so next comes an update. Hang on ...
Got 23 new upgrades on that Plasma machine. Vivaldi-stable is the first browser I've tested. It launched with the AMA series, and a race video from there played with good video and audio, just as before. Next came MotoGP, and unlike last week, there is no video at all. Just a spinning circle con. This week a WSB race showed the spinning icon, but only for a few seconds. Then the video loaded with good video and audio, just as it did last week.
It seems that nothing has changed except for vivaldi-stable, and not in a good way. Last week, it played videos from MotoGP well, except for no audio. This week, it can't even load a video from that site. Last week it was able to play videos from other sites with good audio and video, and that hasn't changed.
It's a bit different for vivaldi-snapshot. Last week it worked fine where vivaldi-stable failed. It played videos from MotoGP with good audio and video. This week it's an exact copy of vivaldi-stable. Won't load a video from MotoGP at all ... icon just spins. Again, there's no problem with the World Superbikes site. I didn't think there was any point in trying another site with vivaldi-snapshot.
For good measure, I tried Firefox next. This week, it has the same trouble on MotoGP as the other two browsers. Just a spinning circle on that site, On the WSB site, though, it plays videos beautifully. Video and audio. And during all this testing, I discovered that I hadn't refreshed the listing earlier, and there actually IS a new event from Estoril this weekend for WSB, so there will be some races to watch today. I'm glad there's a browser that will allow me to do that.
CONCLUSION: Based on the tests so far, it's pretty clear that this week's update has propagated the error from vivaldi-stable to vivaldi-snapshot. I would have expected the reverse, for the working vivaldi-snapshot to update vivaldi-stable and leave it working this week. So there are apparently three changes this week: (1) snapshot now works the way stable did last week (both bad), and (2) Firefox played the MotoGP videos well last week, but just displays a spinning circle this week, and (3) regarding what changed this week -- the site or the browsers -- it's pretty clear it was the browsers that changed. There are no new races for MotoGP this week, and no new videos. And even Firefox worked differently on MotoGP this week.
The migration of the error from stable to snapshot was certainly unexpected, as was the new error from Firefox, but I can't deny what I saw with my own eyes. Because there were unexpected results, I'm going to verify these on my Plasma laptop while my wife watches the races on TV. I'll post again if I find that I got something wrong in this post.