Thursday, July 07, 2011

Has someone broken YouTube?

Whatever browser I try, I just see a black box.

A quick look on Google reveals others are having the same problem.

You can make the videos play by changing the url to https://... but obviously that doesn't help with embedded videos.

Update: Everywhere I visit I just see black boxes where YouTube videos should be, with the exception of Miss Cellania, where I see one black box, but all the other YouTube videos there work fine. How strange.

Another update: It's started working again. Very peculiar.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Got the same thing going on here in NY. Noticed it this AM -- can't play YouTube in Facebook, but it sometimes plays in GoogleReader. There was a small update for Adobe Flash on their website, but it didn't get rid of the issue. Odd!

arbroath said...

It is odd.

I'm sure it's not a flash issue as LiveLeak videos work fine, and as I said the videos work if you change the url.

Anonymous said...

I just tried it and got through. Typed in True Love Ways by Buddy Holly and it came right up and played. So had no problem

cath said...

Weird. No problem here. And I often have troubles with YouTube.

Hmm... I use Firefox. I just checked with the other two browsers I have installed: Google Chrome is working fine, too, but in IE, I got the same problem you're reporting. It seems like something in IE is incompatible with the newest Flash update.

When I have had similar problems before (usually it's Firefox that can't cope with Flash updates), I've noticed that only some Flash video sites are affected (as you are experiencing -- YouTube vs. LiveLeak or whatever). So it seems that not all implementations of the "standard" are the same.

You might want to try uninstalling Flash completely and then reinstalling an older version. But it's a bit of a pain to do, since the Flash uninstaller doesn't do what it's supposed to and will leave traces of the newest version all over your computer. You'll need to find a third-party Flash uninstaller online (try and find one on a site that you trust, for obvious reasons). I have had to do this before, and it's both annoying and scary, as I am very much a NON-tech-savvy person.

arbroath said...

Cheers for that Cath!

I'll have a play around later.

Miss Cellania said...

I don't know what makes the difference. I make a point to use "the old embed code" instead of the iframe code. But I haven't had any problems SEEING videos elsewhere today. I use Firefox.

arbroath said...

It could be that, Miss C.

I really don't know.

Whether I use IE, Firefox or Chrome, I have the same problem.

Anonymous said...

This drove me crazy for a while yesterday, but the problem cleared up all by itself after a few hours.

Piper said...

I did a system restore twice yesterday trying to fix it. Now I learn it wasn't my computer.