►Problems with Youtube (black boxes) – and how to solve it

Just had a weird problem with Youtube videos on my PC:

couldn’t play most of the videos – on Youtube site nothing worked, and embedded videos only a few worked, I actually first noticed when opened this blog, instead of all the videos there were only black boxes. At first I got alarmed because I thought it could be the plugin or wordpress or the hosting. But then I noticed on other sites and even Youtube had the same issue.

So I googled for it, and found it to be a common problem, but was totally misleaded, as I discovered later. People were mainly talking about problems because of Flash update or other issues, so I updated the browser (Firefox), the Flash plugin, everything.

No change at all. I continued to dig and search, and then finally, on Youtube itself, I found the answer in the comments of a video that had the inspiring title “The video won’t play, what to do now?!”: clear the browsing history, sessions, cookies and cache.

Or, simplifying: press CTRL+SHIFT+DEL (no, that’s NOT the one that reboots your computer ehehe :P) and at the top where it says “History from today” change to “All my history” and then press “Clear”,

That step of selecting the whole history is ESSENCIAL, as I had tried before, but only selected history of today and nothing had changed.

After doing above step, the very same video started to work immediately after pressing F5 to reload the page. Didn’t even need to restart the browser.

So you ask: Why? What happened? Well, I’m sorry, that’s the only part I can’t answer. I plain just don’t know, and couldn’t find any answer either. A bug in FireFox? I doubt that, because I read about people having the same issue on Chrome and Safari…

Anyway, hope this post might help someone out one day 🙂

Ah, and if by chance YOU know the answer to that question, please share 🙂