Youtube screen is blank (black) when viewing via YouTube (http)

Question

Browser - Chrome (latest version - 10.0.648.204)

On http://www.youtube.com, the player never displays - the whole Flash area (including where controls should be at the bottom) is just black. Strangely, the exact same videos embedded into other sites work fine, as they do when changing the URL to https://www.youtube.com.

I've tried clearing all YouTube cookies; and even clearing Windows 7 Basic internet cache, uninstalling Flash entirely (in case it's interfering with the internal implementation in Chrome), disabling Flash hardware acceleration.

As I have a workaround it's not essential, but it'd be an interesting one to pinpoint - any ideas? (Would obviously prefer not to delete all my cookies, sign-in data etc for no reason!).

Edit (10th Apr 2011) - ok, so it's now working again, somehow(!). Apologies that I wasn't able to pinpoint what changed, but I'll keep an eye on this post, and definitely let everyone know if it happens again...

Answer 1

I had very similar symptoms under Mac OS X shortly after upgrading the Flash 10.2. For me, Several, but not all, Flash video sites were affected, not just YouTube. For me, none of the following helped:

• Upgrading to the latest minor rev of Flash.
• Downgrading to Flash 10.1 (still available for free download on a developer-oriented section of the Adobe website for the sake of backward-compatibility testing)
• Enabling or disabling hardware acceleration
• Changing browser settings
• Changing Flash settings
• Disabling browser extensions
• Disabling browser plug-ins besides Flash
• Deleting Flash-related browser cookies
• Using a different browser (Safari, Firefox, Chrome)
• Restarting browsers several times throughout this process
• Logging out and logging back into my account
• Restarting my machine

Eventually I created a new user account on my system and it seemed to work from there. So I went back to my main account and fixed it by deleting all of my Flash preferences / Flash-style cookies / Flash local storage, including:

rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia

...and then restarting my browser.

To do: Can users of other OSes update this Answer for where to find (and how to delete) these same kind of Flash preferences/cache/cookie files under those OSes? I'm marking it as a Community Wiki to make it easier for others to edit.

Answer 2

You may be running AdBlock, which does have a note about YouTube adverts that might cause a black screen.

Answer 3

I just put a comment to your response and can't further edit it, so I'm re-editing my answer: Do Firefox and Internet Explorer break on HTTP but not HTTPS? Is flash up-to-date? Does a flash help Menu show up if you right-click the black box? I'm out of ideas. Here is a link to google's troubleshooting area on the general problem on HTTP without a mention to trying out HTTPS. Anyways, they mentioned the latest Flash (10.2) as possible causes and suggest disabling hardware acceleration. I still think there may be a problem with something blocking you. Check your firewall for ports 80 and 443 and from a new Windows user profile see if Firefox and IE are absolutely fine as opposed to Chrome on that profile. Play around with changing your Flash and Chrome versions if all else fails.

Below is the remainder of my old answer:

Also consider checking your Flash preferences because your computer settings might be blocking some cookies that they consider mandatory --I've already seen my own "deny all flash cookies and don't allow P2P flash video" impossible when I really want to watch a few particular videos for big networks.

Note that the only available Flash "control panel" requires that you to visit Adobe's website. Click around on things like "Global Privacy / [cookie] Storage" settings and see if youtube is denied or not there at all. I had all my settings on deny recently until a few days ago without youtube issues though.