YT may not work on old browsers anymore, starting March 2020

[ClassicNick]

14 hours ago, kuja killer said:

how do i view any youtube videos on this place ? never heard of it before today until your post but... i tried like 5 different websites "not named" invidious on that instances list...and every single time it says "No compatible source was found for this media." on the videos... that doesnt happen on youtube or any other place as far as im aware.

What sort of video format is it expecting from firefox 52.9 ?? :|

In my experience, the only supported video codec by Invidious is h.264. Firefox 52.9.0 esr does not officially support h.264 video (Apparently installing the Adobe Primetime Content Decryption Module will allow h.264 videos to play).

However, as a fallback in case that option doesn't work, I recommend installing Centaury by Feodor2.

[UCyborg]

There's apparently a whole bunch of videos that can't be watched via Invidious, even if the browser supports everything. I get either The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported or the infinite spinning circle.

[siria]

I'm slightly shocked that invidious goes down the tubes now too :-(
And keepvid is unusable too again (or needs stronger JS / younger browsers)
Choices get slimmer and slimmer... all that's good gets destroyed since decades, what a shame.
(offtopic: and just discovered, the pageadviser domain is up for sale too)

Tested a bit yesterday, for me this seems the last remaining *working* download service - anyone know others?
(xxxxx = video ID)
https://bitdownloader.com/download?video=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dxxxxxxxxxx

Perhaps ruclip.com, but no chance without JS either.

Best chance IMO are userscripts which extract the full download-URLs from the video page source. Which is possible from all layouts, even polymer if the page shows only empty space and gray rectangles. Luckily that's what I'm using too.

The prob is, Google must allow this, or won't work. At the moment they still do, for those videos which officially have permission to be downloaded. But others (like new, protected music videos) are not downloadable/viewable this way at all. Am afraid it's only a matter of time until GoogleGod will decide he wants to block ALL downloads, which will be very easy. They could simply obfuscate all download URLs as they already do with protected videos, or worse, if visitors have JS blocked or don't fulfill other tracking requirements, not send them any URLs at all.

Without a download service and neither a userscript, the last resort could be to try and manually extract the page source:
Hit CTRL+U and search in html source for:
"itag\":18,
to find the download URL for mp4-video in 360p quality.

The URL is about 3000 letters long (!!) and ends shortly before "mimeType"
Other sizes:
22 = hd720p
18 = medium 360p
36 = small 144 (actually 320x240, save as *.3gp, only available with a MOBILE useragent)
.

Edited August 4, 2020 by siria

[loblo]

Youtube-dl
 

[InterLinked]

YouTube seems to work more or less fine in New Moon 28 and Firefox 52.9 ESR on Windows 2000 with Extended Kernel. Presumably, would work in XP, too.

[reboot12]

Mouse volume control in Google Chrome works again :-)

[ThomasW]

@siria if it wasn't clear, I would think that the YouTube-dl program would work pretty well for your use case since it sounds like you're just looking to extract the videos from the page at this point.

To find the available formats, use: "youtube-dl --list-formats %VideoURL%", or "-F"! [case sensitive]
and then pick the one you want, e.g.: "youtube-dl -f 18 %VideoURL%"

Did none of the alternative Invidious instances work for you?  (that seems a lot nicer to me for casual viewing since it's a Website rather than a downloader program)

The good thing about youtube-dl though is that it works not just on YouTube, but on practically any Website (unless they've seriously tried to obfuscate operations through tons of crazy JavaScript)

Edited August 9, 2020 by ThomasW

[reboot12]

Today is September 7, 2020, OS WinXP SP2 x64
Watching movies on YT:
- still works fine in Firefox
- in Chrome it is impossible to turn on full screen on some videos
YT Studio:
- Firefox - works
- Chrome - works but very bad

Please do not write in this topic about browsers or plugins other than the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome for WinXP !!!

The topic could be properly closed.

Edited September 7, 2020 by reboot12

[RainyShadow]

9 hours ago, reboot12 said:

Please do not write in this topic about browsers or plugins other than the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome for WinXP !!!

The topic could be properly closed.

But why?

Did you thought these 11 pages were written to support only you?

You should've said so in the OP...

[reboot12]

3 hours ago, RainyShadow said:

But why?

This topic was started by me.

I meant mainly Firefox and Chrome web browsers - my mistake - I should have titled as:

YT may not work on old browsers Firefox & Chrome anymore, starting March 2020

We currently have September 2020 and these browsers work as I wrote in the previous post.

I started the topic because I thought that from April Firefox and Chrome would stop working, but it did not.

As of today, you don't need any combinations to use YT on WinXP - you only need Firefox ESR 52.9.0 for watching and editing videos, or Chrome for just watching videos.

[siria]

reboot12 said:

Please do not write in this topic about browsers or plugins other than the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome for WinXP !!!

Well, as RainyShadow already mentioned, after 11 pages it's a bit late to suddenly convert a general topic into a very restricted one:

From "old browsers"
to:
- only Firefox and Chrome
- only on XP
- AND only their LATEST version for XP

reboot12 said:

I should have titled as:
YT may not work on old browsers Firefox & Chrome anymore, starting March 2020

that's neglecting "XP" again, and "latest version"....
.
Edited September 7, 2020 by siria

[reboot12]

4 minutes ago, siria said:

- only on XP
- AND only their LATEST version for XP

It is obvious that these are the latest versions for WinXP. Besides, we are in the Windows XP forum section.

[Tripredacus]

Things change, new ideas come about, people like to relive old times, etc. Not closing topic.

[Ganesha Sharma]

Modern YouTube works great in Firefox, Chrome works great too, but in Chrome, the left bar is misaligned. Michael MJD uses SeaMonkey on XP, and it loads Deviant Art just fine.

I tested YouTube in a XP VM, it works great.