YouTube videos on cell phone are suddenly black screen

Factual Questions
1

Hope somebody can help – can’t find a fix or cause anywhere.

I have an Android phone. Every night I peruse my favorite YouTube videos before going to sleep.

A couple of days ago, I try to check out a YT vid on the phone and everything works just fine, the video shows the thumbnail, but when I go to play it, the video screen is black. I can hear the audio just fine, and tapping on the black screen brings up the usual Pause/Play and such options, but the video screen stays black.

Yes, I have done a phone restart, turned completely off then on, cleared the caches, tried other videos – still black video.

Searching for the problem online shows that this happens sometimes, but the posts are years old.
Some say Twitter is to blame, but never had it on my phone (believe it or not).

I have reinstalled YT, changed login info, run malware test – no difference. Many of the fixes I found online are on apps or settings that I do not have.

This just happened overnight. I changed nothing on the phone, didn’t download anything, didn’t fool with any settings.
Any ideas? I kinda like watching YT in bed and don’t want to have to go back to the desktop just to YT surf.

2

Is it attempting to connect to another device in your house?
My first thought is that it’s trying to send the video to another screen. If you have a Chromecast, unplug it, put your laptop and tablet (if you have them) in airplane mode and see what happens. If it’s still doing it, you could unplug your router and see if it’s still happening.

You can’t put your phone in airplane mode or you won’t be able to watch the videos, but you could turn off wifi and bluetooth. If it’s connected to another device in your house, that would break the connection.

3

Rethinking what I said, it doesn’t make sense, if it were casting to another device you wouldn’t have sound. I was thinking back to when I would have video but no sound. I eventually figure out that it was trying to play the sound through my car radio. That wouldn’t work here.

Most of what I’m seeing mentions to force stop and clear the cache, but you’ve done that.

I did see one other suggestion to bring the video quality down to 720 or lower. See if that works.