Youtube not playing again...

If you download the video with youtube-dl or one of its offshoots, does the result play OK locally?

Not sure what that would prove, just thought it might be something to try ...

Not familiar with youtube-dl, but I tried looking at my Netflix account. Same story: I can view the catalog page, click on a video, the video window opens but then gets stuck. It's an ad-free account, so ad blocker issues can't be in play unless the ad blocker is mistaking content for ads..

Leading up to this state of affairs I've seen numerous "page unresponsive" messages. The reload button never works, but closing the tab and opening a new one to the same (in this case, YouTube) page permitted normal operation for at least a few (sometimes many) minutes.

It seems likely this is a local problem with chrome or RasPiOS. I've looked at the Raspberry Pi forums and found no similar complaints.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

I won't just blame Wayland with no evidence.

I doubt if Netflix or any streaming service will work, as they require DRM features which aren't in Chromium. Google Chrome on my x86 Linux laptop is the only thing that will play services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.

I had problems with Chromium on my Pi 4Bs becoming unresponsive and not displaying the BBC news pages correctly. That was with the 32 bit variant of Bullseye. I did a semi-in-place upgrade to 64 bit, and the Chromium on that, even though it had the same version number, worked perfectly.

If you are a Pi 4 or 5, I would recommend moving to the 64 bit version of the OS, as I suspect the 32 bit variants of heavy weight desktop apps, such as browsers, are not going get as much attention. Plus 64 bit is a bit faster, as long as you have plenty of memory, (don't try it on a 1MB 3B+).

---druck

What's got me baffled is that YouTube and Netflix both worked quite well until just a few days ago.

When first setting up a Pi4 I too had lots of trouble getting chromium to work with YouTube and Netflix, solved largely with help from this newsgroup. Since then YouTube has worked routinely and Netflix worked when (infrequently) used.

YouTube is said to be obstructing ad blockers, but little has been said about exactly how. It occurs to me that making desired content look like advertising would be a very effective way to render ad blockers useless.

Sorry I should have mentioned from the start that this is on a Pi5/64bit. The problem extends to Firefox ESR, which behaves similarly to chromium: It displays thumbnails, opens the video window, starts loading and stalls with the counter not advancing. I can manually move the playback point and the counter moves but the video will not play. In firefox I was given a sign-in window eventually, in chromium there's a "...restart your device" prompt but nothing about signing up.

I haven't rebooted the system in a while, just installed updates whenever they're announced. Will the software update utility prompt for a reboot if it's necessary? I'd expect that to happen only after a kernel update.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

For lack of a better idea I tried rebooting and once the dust settled YouTube videos returned to normal, so apparently I didn't reboot when I should have after an update. Is there a test for needing to reboot?

The reboot was surprisingly fraught. After a graceful reboot there was a black screen. Power-cycling produced the same result. After a few such tries I booted from a microSD. The machine came up immediately, fsck reported the boot USB disk clean. After a graceful shutdown and removing the microSD card the Pi5 came back up from USB when power was reapplied.

So far, so good.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

Ive seen random slowdowns and stickiness on youtube recently.

I'd assumed it was trying to deal with malware or adblockers and not always getting the balance right.

Last I checked, youtube throttles youtube-dl to dialup speeds. Has this been fixed?

Have you got the same gstreamer good/bad/ugly plugins installed as before?

Yes, they have got hotter against blockers recently.

Yes, Chrome even said it would no work with downloaders such as download helper. Firefox does. YT delivers the filename of the previous movie with download helper since 2 weeks. Only YT. Reloading the page gets rid of that misfeature.

Gerhard