Help me fix my YouTube!

January 7, 2015 7:40 AM

YouTube seems to be somewhat broken for me in the last two weeks. I can only get a small number of videos to play; the rest try to load, but then I get a very unspecific error message ("an error occurred, please try again later."). Nothing has changed in my system since this happened. I'm running the latest Firefox on Windows 7...I've cleared the cache and cookies several times, and I'm officially out of ideas. Help!
posted by altopower to Technology (8 answers total)

I was having this problem in Firefox, along with several other Flash player problems, despite having an up-to-date Firefox and up-to-date Flash plug-in. I tried these solutions and ended up just switching to another browser (Chrome in my case).
posted by muddgirl at 7:46 AM on January 7, 2015

I had a similar problem, and when I tried disabling my browser addons/extensions one at a time, I eventually found that one of them (completely unrelated to youtube) was causing the problem. You might want to give that a try :-)
posted by isaacq at 8:07 AM on January 7, 2015

May want to try a new Firefox profile, too.

Does YouTube work with Internet Explorer?
posted by dforemsky at 8:15 AM on January 7, 2015

Best answer: Try reloading the page when you get that error. That works for me every time. Are you running an adblocker?
posted by bq at 8:30 AM on January 7, 2015

I use Opera, but I frequently have this problem when trying to view YouTube videos inside Facebook. I simply click on the YouTube icon at the bottom of the video so i view them on the YouTube page instead and they almost always work there.
posted by scorpia22 at 8:33 AM on January 7, 2015

Response by poster: Try reloading the page when you get that error. That works for me every time. Are you running an adblocker?

Reloading the page seems to be successful! I do run Adblock Plus, but again, that hasn't changed lately. If reloading stops working, I'll try it in Chrome and see if I have different luck there.

Thanks!
posted by altopower at 8:37 AM on January 7, 2015

setting your DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, which are googles free DNS servers, makes youtube work awesome in my experience. It lets them constantly direct you to the latest youtube servers, and load balance by directing you to the ones that currently have the most capacity.

i went from constantly buffering at 480p to being able to instantly start and play all the way through at 1080p on my work machine by doing that.
posted by emptythought at 2:15 PM on January 7, 2015

Ad blockers periodically cause problems with Youtube; it doesn't matter if you haven't changed anything yourself, both Youtube and the ad blocker extension code are changing all the time. I assume Google regularly changes the way ads are delivered and don't care to test if it breaks the page for people using ad blockers, so it stays broken until the extension gets patched to work around it.
posted by Nelson at 3:24 PM on January 7, 2015