Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
Have you tried Opera? That's a pretty good browser and should support Youtube properly
https://www.opera.com/
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Any Reason I Can't Open Any Youtube???
- Thread starter thehangingtree
- Start date
Have you tried Opera? That's a pretty good browser and should support Youtube properly
https://www.opera.com/
malins
Stumbling Seeker
Anyway here's what I get.
Firefox 48 - fine; does not require Flash to be activated
Opera 39 - wanted me to install flash separately - I didn't do that;
Chrome 52 - need to right-click to enable flash, then fails; looks like Madiosi's screenshot
IE 11 - broken, looks like Madiosi's screenshot, uses flash.
So it might also be flash related. Interestingly, at least for me, the only browser that defaults to HTML5 player is Firefox.
(I prefer that anyway)
Firefox 48 - fine; does not require Flash to be activated
Opera 39 - wanted me to install flash separately - I didn't do that;
Chrome 52 - need to right-click to enable flash, then fails; looks like Madiosi's screenshot
IE 11 - broken, looks like Madiosi's screenshot, uses flash.
So it might also be flash related. Interestingly, at least for me, the only browser that defaults to HTML5 player is Firefox.
(I prefer that anyway)
LittleSiss
Sorceress
RacingRodent
Consul
I use Opera as my back up browser for when Firefox tries the whole "A memory leak is a feature not a bug!" idiocy again...which it is wont to from time to time and basically the only occasions when I have issues with it.
malins
Stumbling Seeker
Hmmm, it's perhaps not the best idea to keep very old versions of a browser around just to support some add-on that isn't well maintained by its developers.
I wouldn't want to guess how many security issues Firefox has fixed between versions 28 and 48. I just update a lot of my standard programs no-questions-asked with Ninite.
I do have Downloadhelper and that works with me on 48.
I wouldn't want to guess how many security issues Firefox has fixed between versions 28 and 48. I just update a lot of my standard programs no-questions-asked with Ninite.
I do have Downloadhelper and that works with me on 48.
malins
Stumbling Seeker
OK I'll confess... way back (2000/2001) I was an Opera fanatic, that was, for instance, the first browser that had tabs long before anyone else came up with the idea...
It's true about Firefox and memory leaks. Occasionally I'll just kill the process. Since it'll come back up with all the tabs I don't worry all that much but it is a flaw.
Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
Yeah I know that they've changed the way that addons work in FF48 (which is why I've been putting off the update - I'm still on 47 at the moment - I want to read some user reviews first as I too have had things break because of Firefox updates)I hate the short update sequences from firefox. After Update many not more works AddOns.
I use 3 Versions from firefox.
With 28 worked DownthemAll later Versions by me not
43 worked DownloadHelper and TranslateAddOn
and 48 (i not testing) embedded Videos.
Interestingly, the Firefox memory leak issue seems to affect Windows systems far more than Linux ones. That's not to say it doesn't hog the memory on Linux - it certainly does - but I guess Linux manages its memory resources more efficiently than Windows does, in line with the general concensus on such matters, resulting in fewer crashes as a result.
Personally I have never once experienced a Firefox crash on my own system (and I've used it ever since the very first version came out - and before that I used Netscape Navigator, on which Firefox was based), though I know plenty of other people for whom FF crashes on a very regular basis. I've found that the likelihood of a Firefox crash seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of RAM in your machine. I currently have 8Gb on the main PC and 4Gb on my laptop and it never crashes on either. Most people I know are rocking systems with 1Gb or less and they all experience memory issues with Firefox. To be fair, 4Gb should be more than enough to dodge the memory leak issue - unless you're one of those people who regularly have 20 or more tabs open at the same time...
old slave
FELIS RESPICIENS
Same result in England as malins.
Now post 67 in Help with cats is a facebook video and plays perfectly.
Does that narrow it down to YouTube?
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Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
Got to be a Flash issue then. Youtube is pretty much all HTML5 these days but will still drop back to Flash for those browsers that don't fully support HTML5. The curious thing here is that Chrome does support it (as do all modern browsers), so it's still difficult to see exactly what's going on here 
You used to be able to get a Chrome addon called HTML5ify that forced Youtube to use HTML5 instead of Flash but Google, in their not-so-infinite lack of wisdom, have removed it from the Chrome Web Store
Not sure if there's another way to force Chrome to use HTML5, or even if this is the problem - Chrome is supposed to fully support HTML5 so maybe the issue is that some videos are Flash-only (unlikely these days, since they wouldn't work on mobile)
And that's a point - do these non-working videos work on your mobile devices?
You used to be able to get a Chrome addon called HTML5ify that forced Youtube to use HTML5 instead of Flash but Google, in their not-so-infinite lack of wisdom, have removed it from the Chrome Web Store
Not sure if there's another way to force Chrome to use HTML5, or even if this is the problem - Chrome is supposed to fully support HTML5 so maybe the issue is that some videos are Flash-only (unlikely these days, since they wouldn't work on mobile)
And that's a point - do these non-working videos work on your mobile devices?
Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
Yeah it definitely appears to be only Youtube that's affected. Some users are reporting that it only affects recently posted videos - Not sure if this means recently posted to Youtube or just recently posted to this forum. If it's the former than maybe Google have been screwing around with their API, although that seems unlikely as such changes would most likely affect the whole Youtube site rather than just some videos.
If it's only those posted to this site recently then I have to ask this - Have the site admins changed or updated anything recently? (We all know about the vast amount of grief caused when the site update went south and people couldn't access images posted in the forums - I'm wondering if something similar may have happened again - Although any problem here on CF should affect all browsers, not just IE and Chrome - unless something has been broken in the site's Flash support...
There are a huge number of variables in any issue like this, but overall it does seem to be pointing towards interactions between Flash and certain browsers, and it seems to be specific to Youtube videos. Beyond that. it's hard to find a pattern here. I'm going to try booting my PC from an alternative Linux Live CD that uses Chromium as its default browser (Most Linuxes these days ship with Firefox as default) and do some research to see if I can narrow this down any further...
Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
Well that was an interesting experience...
I first booted up the system with a Live CD of Peppermint OS6, which is a Linux distro that has Chromium as its default browser. Using this I was unable to view ANY embedded Youtube video on this site - they all presented with the black screen and the "Watch on Youtube" link at the bottom right (Which doesn't work, as many of you have already pointed out - it merely redirects you to the Youtube front page)
Bear in mind that this was a pretty old version of Chromium though.
I then decided to try Chrome - the nice thing about these Linux live CDs is that they run the filesystem in RAM so even though you're running off a CD, you can install programs to the RAMdisk without affecting your main install on the hard drive - so I installed Chrome 48 (The last version of Chrome to support 32-bit systems - My Peppermint 6 CD is the 32-bit version, as it's a couple of years old now)
This gave identical results to using Chromium. (No real surprise there as Chrome and Chromium are almost identical, except that Chrome is generally more up to date and has DRM support, but it was interesting to confirm the issue)
So I shut the system down and booted the Live CD of Linux Mint 17.3 (The same version that I currently have running on my hard drive) and installed the very latest 64-bit Chrome into that, but this too gave exactly the same results, so switching to the latest version made no difference.
At this point I decided to try it in Firefox, since that comes on the Live CD anyway as the default browser. This is where I had a bit of a surprise - I was getting identical results in Firefox as well!
This was a real shock as Firefox as installed onto my hard drive plays the videos just perfectly. The only thing of note is that Linux Mint 17.3 came out in 2015, so it has an older version of Firefox bundled with it (FF42.0)
I've just rebooted from my hard drive and everything is fine again (Firefox 47)
I did a bit of googling around while testing Chrome on the Live CD and there were lots of suggestions of how to fix the issue but NONE of them did any good at all.
So frankly I'm still at a bit of a loss to explain this. Quite obviously it's a Flash issue that's affecting embedded Youtube content.
Here's the interesting thing;
Going back to the Music thread with the video mentioned earlier - ELP, Fanfare for the common man, I right-clicked to examine the page source code, and here's the actual block of code that displays the video on the page:
Note the part that states;
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
This tells the browser that this is a Flash video and to use the Flash Player to view it. Right-clicking it in Chrome or Chromium brought up the Flash Player context menu, as expected.
However, when I right-click the video in FF47, I get the HTML5 Player context menu instead, and everything works just fine, so somehow, Firefox is using HTML5 to play this Flash video without having to invoke the Flash Player subsystem. All very clever stuff but sadly none of this actually tells us what the real problem is.
Hopefully the next Chrome update will fix this issue. In the meantime, the best advice I can give everyone is to be using an up to date version of Firefox to access this site...
Here's a link to a test page for checking out embedded Youtube links - I'd be interested to hear if those of you having trouble with videos on CF site can see the videos on this test site... This is a few years old now, so I'm not sure how much, if any, of this is still valid but it should be an interesting test.
I first booted up the system with a Live CD of Peppermint OS6, which is a Linux distro that has Chromium as its default browser. Using this I was unable to view ANY embedded Youtube video on this site - they all presented with the black screen and the "Watch on Youtube" link at the bottom right (Which doesn't work, as many of you have already pointed out - it merely redirects you to the Youtube front page)
Bear in mind that this was a pretty old version of Chromium though.
I then decided to try Chrome - the nice thing about these Linux live CDs is that they run the filesystem in RAM so even though you're running off a CD, you can install programs to the RAMdisk without affecting your main install on the hard drive - so I installed Chrome 48 (The last version of Chrome to support 32-bit systems - My Peppermint 6 CD is the 32-bit version, as it's a couple of years old now)
This gave identical results to using Chromium. (No real surprise there as Chrome and Chromium are almost identical, except that Chrome is generally more up to date and has DRM support, but it was interesting to confirm the issue)
So I shut the system down and booted the Live CD of Linux Mint 17.3 (The same version that I currently have running on my hard drive) and installed the very latest 64-bit Chrome into that, but this too gave exactly the same results, so switching to the latest version made no difference.
At this point I decided to try it in Firefox, since that comes on the Live CD anyway as the default browser. This is where I had a bit of a surprise - I was getting identical results in Firefox as well!
This was a real shock as Firefox as installed onto my hard drive plays the videos just perfectly. The only thing of note is that Linux Mint 17.3 came out in 2015, so it has an older version of Firefox bundled with it (FF42.0)
I've just rebooted from my hard drive and everything is fine again (Firefox 47)
I did a bit of googling around while testing Chrome on the Live CD and there were lots of suggestions of how to fix the issue but NONE of them did any good at all.
So frankly I'm still at a bit of a loss to explain this. Quite obviously it's a Flash issue that's affecting embedded Youtube content.
Here's the interesting thing;
Going back to the Music thread with the video mentioned earlier - ELP, Fanfare for the common man, I right-clicked to examine the page source code, and here's the actual block of code that displays the video on the page:
Note the part that states;
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
This tells the browser that this is a Flash video and to use the Flash Player to view it. Right-clicking it in Chrome or Chromium brought up the Flash Player context menu, as expected.
However, when I right-click the video in FF47, I get the HTML5 Player context menu instead, and everything works just fine, so somehow, Firefox is using HTML5 to play this Flash video without having to invoke the Flash Player subsystem. All very clever stuff but sadly none of this actually tells us what the real problem is.
Hopefully the next Chrome update will fix this issue. In the meantime, the best advice I can give everyone is to be using an up to date version of Firefox to access this site...
Here's a link to a test page for checking out embedded Youtube links - I'd be interested to hear if those of you having trouble with videos on CF site can see the videos on this test site... This is a few years old now, so I'm not sure how much, if any, of this is still valid but it should be an interesting test.
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LittleSiss
Sorceress
You still are amazing me, DP!
Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
Thank you Siss - you always say the sweetest things
Forget Google, just goggle - in awe and admiration! 
Today's quirk of the wondrous technology was finding around teatime that I couldn't get onto Facebook -
no way, Firefox or Chrome, short cut or long way round, just got a blank white screen.
Okay again now. Just keep telling myself, not long ago you didn't have and didn't need all this stuff,
why has it suddenly become a life-support system?
Today's quirk of the wondrous technology was finding around teatime that I couldn't get onto Facebook -
no way, Firefox or Chrome, short cut or long way round, just got a blank white screen.
Okay again now. Just keep telling myself, not long ago you didn't have and didn't need all this stuff,
why has it suddenly become a life-support system?
Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
not long ago you didn't have and didn't need all this stuff,
why has it suddenly become a life-support system?
That's a fair point. Having said that, I consider it a problem when something used to work and now suddenly doesn't. Updates break stuff way too easily these days, where the standard software development model is to get the unwitting consumer to carry out all the product testing that, frankly, should have been done by the developers before it was pushed out of the gate.
Since Chrome is a Google product, and Youtube is also a Google service, the two not playing together is a very serious case of ball-dropping by the G empire
malins
Stumbling Seeker
Here's the interesting thing;
Going back to the Music thread with the video mentioned earlier - ELP, Fanfare for the common man, I right-clicked to examine the page source code, and here's the actual block of code that displays the video on the page:
Note the part that states;
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
This tells the browser that this is a Flash video and to use the Flash Player to view it. Right-clicking it in Chrome or Chromium brought up the Flash Player context menu, as expected.
However, when I right-click the video in FF47, I get the HTML5 Player context menu instead, and everything works just fine, so somehow, Firefox is using HTML5 to play this Flash video without having to invoke the Flash Player subsystem. All very clever stuff but sadly none of this actually tells us what the real problem is.
Well that uses the old <object .../> /<embed .../> syntax which according to Google is 'deprecated' which pretty much means unexpected results might occur.
https://developers.google.com/youtube/flash_api_reference?hl=en#Revision_History
So in part it may be a problem that the Xenforo system outputs an old-style embedding code when we as users insert a video in a post, instead of the up-to-date and recommended iframe solution
https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference?hl=en
As to Firefox, what seems to happen is a bit of DOM manipulation, a complete HTML document gets injected on the fly inside the <object> tag, and that builds the HTML5 player - 'Firebug' will show that. No idea where this magic is coming from.
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Darkprincess69
High Priestess of Slaanesh
Yeah I must admit that this did cross my mind, and frankly I'm a little surprised that the site is pumping out old code, given that it was allegedly updated only a month or so back. You're right about Firefox switching it to HTML5 rather than the Flash source (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that all embedded Youtube videos use Flash, is that right?)
Maybe the site's PHP compiler could do with a bit of an update. Since Google have changed the way that embedded Youtube videos are supposed to work, maybe they're enforcing that change strictly within Chrome now (although earlier versions of Chrome (and Chromium) were exhibiting the same issues in the tests I ran this afternoon), so this only deepens the mystery...
I checked the older YouTube posts and none work
