Help! YouTube video is black.

General Questions
#1

OS: WinXP Home 2002 SP3
Browser: IE 8, Chrome 10, Firefox 5

Symptoms: Click on a video, browser goes to that youtube page, get the little white dots going around in a circle on black background. White dots freeze, video starts playing, sound works OK, video stays black with the circle of white dots.

I un-installed Flash Player and re-installed 10.2 (IIRC). That seemed to help IE for a moment, but now the symptoms have returned.

We’re running AVG Anti-virus and it is up-to-date, so I don’t think it’s a virus.

Tried YouTube help but (aside from the Flash Player re-install) didn’t find anything helpful.

Any advice?

#2

Something a bit like this happened to me a while ago, and I traced it back to having tinkered with the local caching and privacy settings for Flash Player (they’re adjusted by visiting the settings manager page here:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html

(the reason I didn’t immediately associate the symptoms with the changes I had made was because there had been an interval between the tweaking and the next time I happened to try watching online video).

#3

Are you positive that the video in question hasn’t been blocked by youtube, or overwritten with a black one for some reason? Can a friend view this video? Can you view other videos?

#4

I had the same problem a while back. It turned out to the result of a corrupted profile in my browser (Firefox). I uninstalled FF, making sure to tick the box to delete the profile/preferences, and did a clean install. I then finally got YT working again.

#5

I am now having this problem, but only on Youtube. I can watch flash videos on Google Videos, but not on Youtube.

Doesn’t play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64mnYeXY4-0
Plays fine: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3209377178871554737#

Flash Player 10.2.152.26
Internet Explorer 9
Windows 7

#6

For the last couple of weeks, I get no video at all on the regular settings of YouTube, although sound comes through fine. (YouTube videos embedded elsewhere, or viewed on the creator’s channel, are totally normal.) Has YouTube changed their settings somehow?

#7

Dunno, but this happened to me also, though within the past few days. I’ve tried a number of workarounds, too, but nothing fixes it.

#8

I had the same problem, it’s due to flash player hardware acceleration.

The solution is to open any Youtube video with Internet explorer and right click on the screen.

Choose settings and deselect hardware acceleration, youtube should now work on any browser.

#9

Apollo - thanks so much! It’s working fine for me now. What’s hardware acceleration, anyway?

#10

When I right click on the Youtube video screen, I get a Flash window that says, “Movie not loaded. About Adobe Flash Player 10.2.150.32”

No settings. Clicking on “About Adobe Flash Player” takes me to an Adobe web page.

#11

I can watch a YouTube link on facebook but not on YouTube.

#12

Fear Itself - I think that Apollo’s tip was for those of us who got a blank white screen (with sound) on YouTube’s website, but could watch YouTube videos elsewhere. Or at least, that was my situation, until I took his/her advice.

#13

What to do if Settings… is grayed out and unselectable?

#14

Try changing the setting with Internet explorer.

#15

There is no option for settings in IE. Just Movie not loaded… (greyed out; unselectable) and About Adobe Flash Player 9

#16

My wife’s computer just now developed the same problem. Movie simply doesn’t load. The symptoms are the same in Firefox and Internet Explorer. It’s as if the computer has simply decided it doesn’t want to load anything from YouTube’s movie server.

She followed a tip online that fixed the problem to connect via https instead of http. For some bizarre reason this fixed the problem.

#17

I started having this problem just a few hours ago. Is there a virus going around or something?

#18

I solved the problem on my computer by uninstalling Flash completely, using Revo Uninstaller Pro, then reinstalled Flash 10.2.

#19

I’ve been crashing my Flash Player in Firefox for the last few weeks. I just tried the Apollo method and the vids appear to be working fine now. Thanks, Apollo!

#20

The problem is that the latest Flash player has a lot of bugs in the updater. It seems to work perfectly well if you do a fresh install, but if you’ve used Flash before, it’s a roulette.

This is why I always recommend not to update Flash right away when they go to a new full version. I have yet to see a website require 10.1, let alone 10.2.

And, yes, the hardware acceleration in 10.2 is somewhat broken. I think it used to fall back to not accelerating if it wouldn’t work, but now it doesn’t, so you have to manually shut it off.

Finally, YouTube does their videos a little different than everyone else. On the actual website, they don’t directly embed the video, but stick it inside a container. That’s probably why some people are only having problems with YouTube, and not anywhere else.

BTW, there’s one more problem you can have with YouTube, but it would be hard to accidentally do. There’s an HTML5 version you can opt into, but it’s still in beta and thus has problems. I wouldn’t use it unless you just hated Flash. (I believe iPads either use their own program, or use it automatically.)