YouTube video page not loading

Question

The Youtube website is working fine for me, i.e, I can browse the site fine and search videos. But when I click on any videos, I just get a blank page.

For example, let's say I open YouTube and search for LAN Party: GTA IV PvP, I get the search results with the list of related videos but when I click on any video, I just get a blank page with the video URL in the address bar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ZsXFAiF8M

For now I'm changing the url to http://www.youtube.com/v/p9ZsXFAiF8M to watch the videos but I need a permanent fix.

This issue is there on Chrome and also on IE. This is my home connection and my roommate’s PC on the same connections loads the pages fine.

Solution 1

Does it happen when you try youtube in incognito mode?

If so, try clearing the cache and cookies. If that doesn't fix it try disabling each extension you've installed, sometimes chrome extensions can cause problems with page rendering(eg:-adblock).

If that doesn't do it, turn off any flags you might have enabled in chrome://flags, or go to chrome's properties and insert "--no-experiments" without quotes in the target box to disable all flags:

If it still doesn't work, you should try installing flash externally from this site and then disabling the built in flash by going to "chrome://plugins", clicking on details in the right hand side of the screen, then navigating to Adobe Flash Player and disabling the plugin whose location is something like "Chrome\Application\26.0.1410.64\PepperFlash\pepflashplayer.dll ". Make sure that there is another entry under Adobe Flash Player that remains enabled.

If the problem persists, try reinstalling chrome. If you have sync enabled, it shouldn't be too inconvenient.

Solution 2

When a page does not load I check the page headers via the Terminal in macOS with the curl -I command. Works for Linux too. Just run the following command:

curl -I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ZsXFAiF8M

Using curl -I is great since it shows you exactly what the raw header data is. And here is the output I just got:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 03:30:06 GMT
Server: gwiseguy/2.0
Expires: Tue, 27 Apr 1971 19:44:06 EST
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Set-Cookie: VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=mUe9LuGxIn0; path=/; domain=.youtube.com; expires=Thu, 04-Jun-2015 15:23:05 GMT
Set-Cookie: YSC=xgg_PiS49BQ; path=/; domain=.youtube.com; httponly
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block; report=https://www.google.com/appserve/security-bugs/log/youtube
P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=151657&hl=en for more info."
Alternate-Protocol: 80:quic,p=0.01
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

The key item is HTTP/1.1 200 OK which means the page is loading fine. Which means this is not a network connection issue, but perhaps a browser/software issue.

Comments

[Shazvi]

try deleting youtube's cookies. Refer to one of my previous answers for help on how to do it.