Anyone else have this problem? Any solutions? (I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 and Firefox2 on this system. I also tried accessing youtube using IE7 with the same results)

Ever since Youtube finalized their beta user page to be the default user page (a couple weeks ago? ) youtube's website won't play any of their streaming videos on my main internet system.

It posts the error

Javascript is on, and I'm running Adobe Flash player 9.0.47.0 which I understand to be the latest version. Other streaming players (not on youtube's website) work just fine. I was able to play youtube.com videos perfectly well before youtube made the beta page change.


Some more info:

I also ran a test and used FreshDownloadManager to download the same youtube video that had just failed to play under youtube's website embedded video player. The downloaded ".flv" file plays just fine using a .flv file player (like KMplayer)

Very interestingly, I can also play a Breitbart.ccom streaming video even though the video file is sourced from youtube.com !!! The only difference is that the video is playing using the Breitbart website's embedded player instead of youtube's player!

Neither youtube's online help, nor their online entry form support have solved the problem.

YouTube videos are working fine for me. I had a similar problem a few months ago relating to Flash Player. Apparently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition was holding on to it for dear life which made it impossible to uninstall. In the end, I erased and installed the OS and all was good. My suggestion is to try to uninstall Flash and then install it again. See if it fixes it or if it even lets you uninstall.

FordGT90Concept said:

I'll try that again. When I uninstalled it the first time (using "Add or Remove Programs" to remove "Adobe Flash Player plug-in" ) everything seemed to proceed normally. I have a feeling I'm going to end up having to manually edit the registry before re-installing the player...I just don't know exactly what's causing the problem.


edit to clarify what I'd done previously

That's just it. I couldn't even delete the related registry entries because Windows was protecting them. The registry unlockers didn't work either because they don't work with 64-bit operating systems.

Works fine on my end.

The Beta layout isn't the default here yet for me.

I still this in the corner: "Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!"

And by the way I hate the Beta layout.

Even though there was no specific fix, I thought I'd post the status.

Problem appears to have finally solved itself about 2 weeks ago without any specific action on my part.

Interestingly enough, when the YouTube-specific flash playing problem was solved, a separate problem I had with FreeDownloadManager auto-naming failures went away.

Between the time they weren't working, and the time they were working properly, I hadn't updated either Flash or Java files, nor changed any permissions. However, in that same time-frame I had installed the "StopAutoPlay" plug-in for Firefox Mozilla (this plug-in stops flash videos from starting up automatically (including YouTube vids) when a web-page is opened)

It still puzzles me that only specific instances of YouTube vids weren't playable, while all others were.

What about other links that use Flash player? What are they like? Do they work ok?
You have 64Bit Vista??

Tam-the-Bam said:

This was on a 32bit XP Pro SP2 system, with latest stable codecs, browser, players, JRE, etc available (as far as I knew) installed.


John Albrich said:

It was interesting that it depended on HOW the vid file was accessed on YouTube as to whether it failed or not, and I developed a work-around to view the failing YouTube vids just by editing the URL. For example,
Change failing URL from this...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ABC123abc
to this...
http://www.youtube.com/v/=ABC123abc
and it would play perfectly fine.

Which lead me to believe it was probably a script failure, and not related to the flash player subsystems.

It really was an odd duck failure. (quack quack)

And, msnbc.com streaming vids wouldn't work either. But, all other streaming vid and flash sources (at least a couple dozen of them) I'd used worked fine.

As mentioned above, it seems to have spontaneously healed itself a couple weeks ago after several months of YouTube and msnbc video flakiness.


edit-added details re editing the YouTube URL to work-around video play failure