"We're sorry, this video is no longer available." YouTube error

April 24, 2008 5:18 PM

Does anyone else get this error message randomly when trying to play YouTube videos embedded on remote Web sites? The video is very much available if you go to the actual page on YouTube.com
posted by LC to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

I've never encountered it myself, but I imagine it's the result of a YouTube user deciding not to allow embeds after some sites have already embedded the videos.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:34 PM on April 24, 2008

That's exactly it – I encountered it for the first time today.
posted by avocet at 5:51 PM on April 24, 2008

I've noticed that this happens if you wait long enough... I always thought that youtube must be opening up some kind of nifty connection to their servers for a period of time that made downloading their clips faster and less choppy.. but that they couldn't keep that connection open forever, so you get an error if you wait too long.. just hit reload, and I think it'll work again.

Perhaps someone else has a better answer?
posted by mhh5 at 6:01 PM on April 24, 2008

I use Firefox with DownloadHelper plugin, and I know sometimes I have to click back from the embed to YouTube and then use DH to get the video (I hope I'm understanding the question properly).
posted by forthright at 6:11 PM on April 24, 2008

As a YouTube poster, you can choose whether or not your video can be embedded. Also, if you have a video and make a change to it and repost it, the URL changes, effectively breaking the link for anyone who has embedded it.
posted by Frank Grimes at 7:19 PM on April 24, 2008

My compy exhibits the same behavior as mhh5's. Reload the page and it works for me. Often happens if I open a grip of tabs and only get to the last ones 20 minutes later.
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:00 AM on April 25, 2008

This recently started happening at work but not at home. We recently installed Websense censorware and I assume its related but I haven't really investigated.
posted by chairface at 11:13 AM on April 25, 2008

seconding wemayfreeze.

Seems to happen at home too.
posted by terpia at 12:26 PM on April 25, 2008

I get this quite often - I've found waiting a while before hitting "Refresh" cures the problem - I assume that the player has a rather over simplistic view { perhaps it's a safety measure to discourage everyone attempting to watch the same video at once?}
posted by Dub at 7:06 AM on April 26, 2008

Google web accelerator was causing this problem for me.
posted by meech at 3:10 AM on June 4, 2008