Channel4 4OD Solved November 24, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Desktop, Online Security.Tags: 40d, black, black screen, channel4, channel4 4od, hangs, hosts, Linux, Loading content, no video, not working, problem, screen, windows
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For some time I have been getting my TV online, principally with the BBC IPlayer. I also receive ITV content, albeit problematically, using the ITV Player. But for some reason I was never able to get the Channel4 4OD service to work.
After selecting a programme to watch I would be presented with an empty video window, a “Loading content” message and nothing else. It didn’t matter whether I used Vista or Linux Mint, Firefox or Internet Explorer, the result was always the same – a sort of black screen of death as shown in this screenshot.
Of course I Googled the problem but found no fix. I could see from the general web chatter that others were having the problem but, clearly, it was a minority issue and there was no obvious solution.
Eventually I saw a reference to a test link that pointed to the url “realmedia.channel4.com” and clicked on it. I expected some kind of test page response or, at worst, perhaps an invalid request or maybe a 404 not found error. Instead nothing happened at all. The click went nowhere. This provided the clue to the problem solution.
After checking my hosts file I found that “realmedia.channel4.com” was being redirected to my localhost at 127.0.0.1 – i.e. nowhere. And this was the reason that 4OD wasn’t working. After commenting out that entry in the hosts file 4OD worked perfectly.
How did this redirection get into the hosts file? I posted a previous blog called “Using The Hosts File To Ward Off Web Attacks” which described how you can download a hosts file from this site to redirect hundreds of well known bad site urls to localhost at 127.0.0.1. This redirection makes these bad sites inaccessible and is a great enhancement to security on the PC generally. However it seems that, for some reason, “realmedia.channel4.com” is included in the hosts file as a bad site url thereby preventing 4OD from working. I’m not sure why the entry for 4OD is considered a bad site that needs to be redirected but it is, as of the date of this post, still being included in the download.
So if you have a problem using the Channel4 4OD service as described above do check your hosts file to see if “realmedia.channel4.com” has been redirected. If you find that this is the case then either removing it or commenting it out will hopefully fix the problem.
Of course now I have to find something on 4OD that I consider worth watching. Sadly, from what I can see, it appears to be some kind of landfill site for the dross that is celebrity culture. But that’s another rant altogether.
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Thanks for this post, you’re right in saying there is no info on this problem when you google it.
I took out the entry from the hosts file and problem solved!
Maybe channel 4 need to put this info on their site!
Thanks for the comment – glad it worked for you.
I couldn’t use 4od for so long, thanks!
Glad it worked for you – thanks for commenting.
Thanks for the info – but how to I edit my hosts file? I don’t know what that is…I’m on Windows 7
Hi – thanks for the response.
Not sure about Windows 7 but on Vista you can find the hosts file here – “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts”
I expect that it’s the same for your Win 7 system. You can view the file with Notepad.
I should point out though that this 4OD problem fix assumes that you have explicitly downloaded a custom hosts file from here. As you don’t know about this file then it seems unlikely you would have done so. But I am sure it’s worth checking anyway.
Hope this helps.
Hi, sorry to keep asking!
I ran the hosts file as an administrator on Notepad, and I deleted the channel4 entry and saved it. 4od still won’t work for me (it did play once or twice after trying several times). But this week I’ve had no luck with it at all…is there something I’m doing wrong?
Many thanks.
Hi – I would have thought that if it worked even once then you have some other problem going on. I’m sorry I don’t know what that might be. I notice that there are in fact 2 channel4.com entries in the hosts file. The other one is “webstat.channel4.com”. For me this doesn’t appear to affect anything but you might try removing that as well. Worth a try.
Thanks for this found the info linked from another site i would have never thought of looking here, saved me getting more earache about no hollyoaks from the Mrs,
Glad you’re sorted – thanks for the comment.
Thanks so much for this. Would never have thought to look there. At least Google returns a good result now!
Well bugger me! Ive seen 4oD and it’s never worked for me, i tried looking at it through youtube assuming it would be streamed from their servers and not channel4′s and none of it worked!
Taken the entry out of my hosts file and it’s at least playing the adverts…. does it play the main….. YES it does.
Thank you SO MUCH for that!! It’d been driving me MAD!
Glad it worked for you too. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment and letting us know.
Thankyou so much for this!
Many, many thanks. Some great deduction to get to the solution! I had forgotten about my hosts file altogether let alone guessed it was the problem.
Cheers
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Thank You!
Problem solved, and it’s been annoying me for months. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Thanks for the comment. Glad it helped.
how do you remove something from the hosts file? i opened it in notepad and i didnt know where to go from there
Hi – you use the mouse to select a section of the file that you want to remove and then hit the delete key.
However I would strongly suggest that before trying to change the hosts file you familiarise yourself with how to use notepad first. Try running notepad with an empty or test file and paste in or type in a few lines and then practise removing them.
Hope that helps.
thought this might be the answer to my issue but checked hosts (on a Mac running firefox) and that address was not listed. Any other pointers?
Hi – I did find another blocked url that affected 4OD on Youtube so you could try removing that as well – see this link:
http://granthamtech.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/channel4-4od-youtube-solved/
Failing that you could check for script blocking, pop-up blocking and cookie blocking etc all of which firefox will let you customise.
It’s also the case that in the recent releases of firefox the ITVPlayer won’t play (at least for me in Linux) and I resort to Chrome to use that site.
Hope that helps.
i thought everyone knew this, but that redirect is used to stop 4OD showing adverts…
When the site goes to real media to look for the ads, it gets looped back to your computer and carried on without them…
Except that, unfortunately, it didn’t carry on….