YouTube: "An error has occurred, please try again later."

[mnewman]

I don't much use YouTube, but a couple of days ago I was told about some Thai language learning lessons that were posted there.

I went to the playlist: ALG Thai and it loaded up OK. However, when I click to view one of the videos, the page loads up fine, but the video portion of the screen remains black and eventually I get a message superimposed on the screen: "An error has occurred, please try again later."

This happens with Safari, Chrome and Firefox. It also happens with Firefox running under Ubuntu 9.10 under VirtualBox. It happens with all three Macs on the home LAN: MacMini running Snow Leopard and an iMac and PowerBook, both running Leopard.

It does not happen with my wife's iPod Touch which is on the same LAN.

It happens no matter what user account is logged in.

I've tried clearing YouTube cookies, clearing history and emptying the browser cache.

I cannot load my Account page on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/account

When I look at Safari's "Activity" window I see many, many "The request timed out" errors on YouTube pages and none on other pages I try to load.

This makes me suspect that this is a YouTube or network congestion problem. But, if that's the case, then why do YouTube videos load up and play right away on my wife's iPodTouch which is on the same network as the machines that cannot load YouTube?

[hayne]

YouTube often (by default?) uses Flash for the videos, so the problem might be something related to Flash on your Mac.
It is possible to ask YouTube to play videos in non-Flash formats that are also better quality and easily handled by QuickTime. I suspect that the iPod Touch is doing that.
One way to do it on your Mac would be via the "ClickToFlash" plugin.

[mnewman]

Thanks for the hint hayne. Didn't work, but I can see how useful it would be.

What did work was using a US based proxy server. So, I suppose that means that either my ISP or the Thai government is blocking YouTube video feeds. They're not blocking the whole site, because that loads almost instantly. It's just URL's like this that never load:

http://v9.lscache6.c.youtube.com/vid...a88ac41baff2d&

[mnewman]

Woke up this morning and YouTube is working. Another unsolved mystery.