Plugin Update Confusion

[Cottonshirt]

OS: Windows XP Professional
VLC: 2.1.5 Ricewind

Hi,

I have been having problems with my browser crashing (Firefox 34.0.5) due to a thing called plugin-container.exe, so I checked to see if my Plugins are up to date and Firefox.com says the VLC Plugin is out of date. So, I went into VLC, clicked on Help > Check for Updates, and this said that An error occurred while checking for updates. I clicked on Recheck version, and got the same error message. Twice.

So, I went to the VideoLan website where I learned that 2.1.5 Ricewind is the latest version. I therefore have two pieces of information that tell me contradictory things. One says I have the latest version and the other says I'm out of date, and, whichever one of those is true, automatic update doesn't work.

I am sufficiently stupid that I don't even know whether it is possible for the software to be up to date and yet the Plugin be out of date, since I don't have any conceptual, metaphorical or hypothetical understanding of what a Plugin even is. Googling Plugin just gets you a long list of Plugins, it's like learning how make bread by watching wheat fields from a train as you speed past at 60 miles per hour.

So, I thought I would just go to the VideoLan website and update manually. I was unable to find an Update button, but clicked on the Download link and was asked, Do you want to save this file?

I don't know. Do I want to save this file, and if so, where do I save it? Does it matter? After I've saved it what happens next? Does it just do it magically by itself or do I have to do something? Why is everything made so deliberately complicated? Why can't it just update what I already have?

Yours, Confused of Southsea.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

The latest version of VLC media player is 2.1.5 and the latest version of the VLC browser plugin is 2.1.3. So you have the latest version; Firefox is buggy.

The automatic update is broken due to unrelated hardware issues on the server side.