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NCAA March Madness Live is a Flash-based video player for the NCAA college basketball tournament that started today. In past years, it worked fine in Linux, but now I get an error that says "Technical Foul" and "V001" when I try to view a video. Their documentation and support staff were not able to help me.

I tried this on two separate computers (both running Ubuntu 12.10) in Firefox and Chrome (FF from the default repos, Chrome stable from Google's repo). Both had the same problem. On both computers I also have a Windows XP virtual machine running inside Ubuntu, and March Madness Live works fine in the VM.

So, any ideas? I know Flash is proprietary and the error message is not very revealing. Has anyone at least been able to watch games in Linux?

EDIT: Just to clarify... the ads usually do play successfully, at least in part. The basketball games have never played for me, even for a second. And while there is a place to log in with your cable/satellite TV provider account, it should give you 4 hours free without doing that. Personally I have tried both logged in and not logged in (as some other people replying here also tried) and neither way works in Linux but both ways work in Windows.

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  • I too am having the same problem. Why on earth should it matter what operating system you are using? Should flash even care what operating system you are using? I get error A002 to A005. All they say in the faq is to restart your browser which doesn't work. One machine I tried it on actually played the ads in Firefox, but not in chrome. On another machine neither browser worked. I tried it on 3 12.04 machines with no positive results. I tried setting the user agent to IE and that didn't work either. I guess I'll have to steal my GF's mac. Man I hate it when people neglect Linux for no real rea
    – user142449
    Mar 22, 2013 at 4:00
  • I got it to work once, just in time to watch my MSU Spartans kick butt. Since then though no dice. I've tried pretty much every browser. I'm guessing that it's something with the flash plugin, since that seems to never be working 100%. If you'd like to watch it and you have a smart phone, there is a free app available.
    – user142634
    Mar 22, 2013 at 20:41

3 Answers 3

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This isn't well noted on the March Madness website, but there's a blue button in the upper right that says 'select TV provider.'

If you click it, you can log in through your provider, where for the first time this helpful text will appear:

Subscription to TBS, TNT or TruTV is required to experience March Madness live online

Since I don't have cable and found that at least the ads worked once I turned off Ghostery and Adblock, my assumption is that the request for the video stream will always fail because I'm not authenticated through my ISP as a cable subscriber.

However, if you have cable, my guess is that you need to click the blue button and log in.

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  • It gives you four hours free without logging in (although I have tried logging in and not logging in). And I should have noted that the ads do usually run, at least for about 15 seconds, but the actual basketball games never play.
    – Jeremy
    Mar 22, 2013 at 13:35
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I also have the same problem. I tried both Firefox and Chrome as well. I have logged in with my cable subscription, but that did not make any difference. For what it is worth, the initial commercial always appears successfully. The error only occurs once it comes time to play the game feed itself.

From http://www.ncaa.com/march-madness-live/help#!devices

The following Operating Systems are supported:

Windows 7
Windows Vista
Windows XP
Windows 8
Mac OS X 10 or higher

It looks like Ubuntu is not directly supported.

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I too experienced this problem using Ubuntu and attempting to watch live games. While speaking with their support, I questioned the blue button. I was told that is only needed to allow unlimited viewing. The Tier 2 tech I was speaking with said that every browser is entitled to 4 free hours without logging in through their provider, so that should not be the problem.

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