July 28, 2012

YouTube Technical Bleg

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Here’s a puzzler: my browser no longer plays YouTube videos. On Thursday they suddenly stopped working on both Firefox and Opera. IE still worked, though. Today, Firefox started working again, but Opera still doesn’t. I just get a big black rectangle with no controls.

Anyone know what this could be? Ad blocking doesn’t seem to be the problem. My laptop still works fine using the same browser version I have on the desktop. I rebooted, of course. I don’t recall installing or updating anything on Thursday. Other video sites still work fine. Only YouTube doesn’t work.

And here’s something else weird. When I embed YouTube videos in the blog, the normal embed codes don’t work. I just get the black rectangle. But the old YouTube embed code displays fine:

  • Doesn’t work: <iframe width=”375″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/watch/xxx”>
  • Doesn’t work: <iframe width=”375″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/xxx”> 
  • Works!          <iframe width=”375″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/xxx”>

I’ve racked my brain and I can’t think of what else to try. What did I do to anger the YouTube gods?

We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

payment methods

We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate