Re: Youtube not playing again...

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