Youtube Video Playback Error

16 Mar 2014

I recently acquired a new PC and rebuilt it to Windows 7 Pro. For some strange reason I could no longer play any Youtube content in Internet Explorer or Firefox as every time I tried I got this message

An error occurred, please try again later

So I naturally pointed my browser towards trusty old Google expecting a solution to jump out at me in the first few results but to my despair nothing. Well nothing that actually worked and I tried numerous solutions.

I eventually gave up and resigned myself to the fact that it was some graphical (driver and/or hardware) issue and that I wasn’t bothered anyway as I’d just have to do without it on that particular device. My Samsung tablet would have to be the Youtube surrogate.

For some reason today I had another crack at it and this time I struck gold. A post in the Mozilla Support forum had this reply

Or, as I found, you can simply plug in a set of headphones into your pc (or use a set of speakers) and that ever present and hugely annoying “an error occurred” message will be gone from your life forever

Now at that point I noticed that the speaker icon in the Notification Area had a cross through it. I knew that the sound on the PC was working and configured but I remembered that the cross meant that no speakers or headphones were connected. So I plugged in some headphones and tried to play a video and you know what it bloody worked. FFS.

Thank you bobsleftnut for your one and only contribution to the Mozilla Support forum. What’s the odds of that happening.