Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos. Another update today touched on things
like ffmpeg (and more) but playback still doesn't seem to work.

The page loads, the progress bar fills in and mousing over the bar
produces thumbnails, but the display window is blank white, mostly.

I've seen some references to YouTube complaining about ad blockers
and I use Ublock Origin consistently, but there have been no
grumbles about it on my machine.

In addition, Firefox and videos on the New York Times main page
do much the same thing, so it isn't unique to YouTube. For the
moment I'm guessing it's a botched update. If somebody happens
to know better please post!

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

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On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:06:01 -0000 (UTC), bp wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

If you download the video with youtube-dl or one of its offshoots, does
the result play OK locally?

Not sure what that would prove, just thought it might be something to
try ...

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:06:01 -0000 (UTC), bp wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

If you download the video with youtube-dl or one of its offshoots, does
the result play OK locally?

Not familiar with youtube-dl, but I tried looking at my Netflix account.
Same story: I can view the catalog page, click on a video, the video
window opens but then gets stuck. It's an ad-free account, so ad blocker
issues can't be in play unless the ad blocker is mistaking content for ads..

Leading up to this state of affairs I've seen numerous "page unresponsive" messages. The reload button never works, but closing the tab and opening
a new one to the same (in this case, YouTube) page permitted normal operation for at least a few (sometimes many) minutes.

It seems likely this is a local problem with chrome or RasPiOS. I've looked
at the Raspberry Pi forums and found no similar complaints.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

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On 21/08/2024 16:36, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:06:01 -0000 (UTC), bp wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

I won't just blame Wayland with no evidence.

Not familiar with youtube-dl, but I tried looking at my Netflix account.
Same story: I can view the catalog page, click on a video, the video
window opens but then gets stuck. It's an ad-free account, so ad blocker issues can't be in play unless the ad blocker is mistaking content for ads..

I doubt if Netflix or any streaming service will work, as they require
DRM features which aren't in Chromium. Google Chrome on my x86 Linux
laptop is the only thing that will play services such as Netflix and
Amazon Prime.

Leading up to this state of affairs I've seen numerous "page unresponsive" messages. The reload button never works, but closing the tab and opening
a new one to the same (in this case, YouTube) page permitted normal operation for at least a few (sometimes many) minutes.

I had problems with Chromium on my Pi 4Bs becoming unresponsive and not displaying the BBC news pages correctly. That was with the 32 bit
variant of Bullseye. I did a semi-in-place upgrade to 64 bit, and the
Chromium on that, even though it had the same version number, worked
perfectly.

If you are a Pi 4 or 5, I would recommend moving to the 64 bit version
of the OS, as I suspect the 32 bit variants of heavy weight desktop
apps, such as browsers, are not going get as much attention. Plus 64 bit
is a bit faster, as long as you have plenty of memory, (don't try it on
a 1MB 3B+).

---druck

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druck <news@druck.org.uk> wrote:

I doubt if Netflix or any streaming service will work, as they require
DRM features which aren't in Chromium. Google Chrome on my x86 Linux
laptop is the only thing that will play services such as Netflix and
Amazon Prime.

What's got me baffled is that YouTube and Netflix both worked quite well
until just a few days ago.

I had problems with Chromium on my Pi 4Bs becoming unresponsive and not displaying the BBC news pages correctly. That was with the 32 bit
variant of Bullseye. I did a semi-in-place upgrade to 64 bit, and the Chromium on that, even though it had the same version number, worked perfectly.

When first setting up a Pi4 I too had lots of trouble getting chromium
to work with YouTube and Netflix, solved largely with help from this
newsgroup. Since then YouTube has worked routinely and Netflix worked
when (infrequently) used.

YouTube is said to be obstructing ad blockers, but little has been said
about exactly how. It occurs to me that making desired content look like advertising would be a very effective way to render ad blockers useless.

If you are a Pi 4 or 5, I would recommend moving to the 64 bit version
of the OS, as I suspect the 32 bit variants of heavy weight desktop
apps, such as browsers, are not going get as much attention. Plus 64 bit
is a bit faster, as long as you have plenty of memory, (don't try it on
a 1MB 3B+).

Sorry I should have mentioned from the start that this is on a Pi5/64bit.
The problem extends to Firefox ESR, which behaves similarly to chromium:
It displays thumbnails, opens the video window, starts loading and stalls
with the counter not advancing. I can manually move the playback point
and the counter moves but the video will not play. In firefox I was given
a sign-in window eventually, in chromium there's a "...restart your device" prompt but nothing about signing up.

I haven't rebooted the system in a while, just installed updates whenever they're announced. Will the software update utility prompt for a reboot
if it's necessary? I'd expect that to happen only after a kernel update.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

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bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

I haven't rebooted the system in a while, just installed updates whenever they're announced. Will the software update utility prompt for a reboot
if it's necessary? I'd expect that to happen only after a kernel update.

For lack of a better idea I tried rebooting and once the dust settled
YouTube videos returned to normal, so apparently I didn't reboot when
I should have after an update. Is there a test for needing to reboot?

The reboot was surprisingly fraught. After a graceful reboot there
was a black screen. Power-cycling produced the same result. After a few
such tries I booted from a microSD. The machine came up immediately,
fsck reported the boot USB disk clean. After a graceful shutdown and
removing the microSD card the Pi5 came back up from USB when power was reapplied.

So far, so good.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

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On 21/08/2024 21:18, druck wrote:

On 21/08/2024 16:36, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:06:01 -0000 (UTC), bp wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

I won't just blame Wayland with no evidence.

Ive seen random slowdowns and stickiness on youtube recently.

*86 Mint/Mozilla...

I'd assumed it was trying to deal with malware or adblockers and not
always getting the balance right.


--
"First, find out who are the people you can not criticise. They are your oppressors."
- George Orwell

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:06:01 -0000 (UTC), bp wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

If you download the video with youtube-dl or one of its offshoots, does
the result play OK locally?

Last I checked, youtube throttles youtube-dl to dialup speeds. Has this
been fixed?

Not sure what that would prove, just thought it might be something to
try ...

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 2024-08-22, Daniel <me@sc1f1dan.com> wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 22:06:01 -0000 (UTC), bp wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

If you download the video with youtube-dl or one of its offshoots, does
the result play OK locally?

Last I checked, youtube throttles youtube-dl to dialup speeds. Has this
been fixed?

Dunno about youtube-dl, but I recently played with its
descendant, yt-dlp, and it seemed to run at a decent speed.

Previously I had been using various web sites that strip MP3s
or MP4s from YouTube videos. They come and go; I search for
"YouTube to MP3" and pick one of whatever is available at the
time. They generally work well, but the user interfaces run
the gamut from obnoxious to unusable. Most of them try to
divert you to porn or gambling sites these days.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

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On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 19:29:07 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

Previously I had been using various web sites that strip MP3s or MP4s
from YouTube videos. They come and go; I search for "YouTube to MP3"
and pick one of whatever is available at the time. They generally work
well, but the user interfaces run the gamut from obnoxious to unusable.
Most of them try to divert you to porn or gambling sites these days.

Obviously they continue to proliferate because people prefer to suffer
them rather than brave the scary world of free, no-strings-attached command-line tools.

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bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

Have you got the same gstreamer good/bad/ugly plugins installed as before?

I've seen some references to YouTube complaining about ad blockers

Yes, they have got hotter against blockers recently.

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Am 24.08.24 um 12:17 schrieb Andy Burns:

bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

Since an update a few days ago Chromium on Bookworm and Wayland have
stopped playing YouTube videos.

Have you got the same gstreamer good/bad/ugly plugins installed as before?

I've seen some references to YouTube complaining about ad blockers

Yes, they have got hotter against blockers recently.

Yes, Chrome even said it would no work with downloaders
such as download helper. Firefox does.
YT delivers the filename of the previous movie with download helper
since 2 weeks. Only YT. Reloading the page gets rid of that misfeature.

Gerhard

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