Why has YouTube stopped working?

Factual Questions
1

For the past couple of days (maybe longer) I haven’t been able to watch any YouTube videos. I get this message:

I don’t have JavaScript turned off. I got the latest Flash player, and I still get the same message. I have tried it on IE7, Chrome and Firefox, same result on all three browsers.

Googling that error message shows that lots of other people are having the same problem, but no solution I can find, other than to watch the videos via Google Videos, which works fine. Any ideas?

I’m running Windows XP on a 2003-vintage PC (Pentium 4 I think).

2

Have you tried uninstalling flash player (download uninstaller here,) then reinstalling?

3

I had some weird Youtube error one time (I don’t think it was the same as what you’re experiencing). What I did was empty my cache and clear the cookies for the site (you can do that with Firefox) and that fixed it.

4

I think it has to do more with the Flash player. I’ve gone to sites where it’s failed to load and hitting reload fixed it.

5

I had the same problem, I downloaded the free codec media playerfrom C/Net and that fixed the problem