When trying to play some YouTube videos I keep half the time get an error.
Play a random YouTube video, some videos work fine.
The video to play.
An error occurs.
Video used as an example of one that won’t play.
Note, the video I use as an example does not have a copyright notice of any kind. The music is made by a friend except I sped it up.
Other videos I’ve made, such as one with no music and are just bug reports also have the same error show other than the playback ID being different ofc.
This seems to be a codec issue with some videos on Youtube. Youtube has updated something that we have no control over.
I only use videos from my own YouTube channel and I have everything set to be able to share on other sites it’s worked great for over a year. Around Nov 14th 80 percent of my videos stopped working with that same error. Like macdguy said it was on YouTube’s end I hope it somehow resets with YouTube’s next update. If anyone figures out a way to get around the error please let me know thank you.
Wanted to pop in with some of my findings on this poking around at youtube videos that worked and don’t work.
First off the issue appears to be down to this, here’s the video from the OP:
that or getting more views on the video somehow.
So I attempted the reuploading with different settings.
first i used a 720@30 video which as expected gave an error.
then i used handbrake to upscale that file to 1440@30 and it played!
Confirmed on my end, here’s the output of those two (720@30 is first and 1440@30 is second)
Thanks for taking the time to check it out. I don’t know much about this stuff but it was helpful to see the photos you posted and everything.
I don’t know if this is helpful but I’m able to host all my videos on the game mtion studio which does a similar thing with media players with no issues. It’s a pretty new game but it is something to note that they’re not having errors over there.
this issue seems to have only gotten worse and worse. nothing i put in ever plays. me and my friends have stopped hanging out on tower much because of it.
Woah great work 
Got this same thing with 0.18.0.0
No video, no sound, just playback error…
Can confirm this still happens. Wonder if it’s related to YouTube putting higher quality settings behind YouTube Premium.
There was a purge a bit ago banned a ton of YT vids finding this issue is occuring on vids that didn’t have issues before the purge. Alot of older vids are now effected.
Returning to this post as the decided subject matter on the topic ;3
Mostly reiterating what i’ve said before, this isn’t tower “banning” a video as I’ve heard some mention or anything like that, it’s a codec issue due to whatever player Tower uses not supporting the AV1av1c* codec.
Just to clarify, there’s nothing youtube will change on this that will make this better, they’d already moved away from anything but their own formats (vp9 and av1), and are now slowly deprecating vp9 encoding as its a much more expensive encode vs av1 which is the successor, which is cheaper to encode and gives smaller sizes.
I’d assume they’ll likely eventually make all videos av1 encoded, at current though its taken some years for webm/vp9 support to get as broad as it has, notably apple didn’t support it for many many years, and as a fun “easter egg”, you can actually find a spike in reports online of ios users unable to play youtube videos through safari once youtube stopped serving anything but vp9 and removed the additional formats they used to serve, right around when this issue cropped up on tower!
Not taking any sides here, just stating the facts, and ultimately its a client thing, youtube/google have no motivation to continue using older formats that take more size (or in the case of h264, costs them money) if they can avoid it, they keep vp9 around on popular videos (and for some reason newly uploaded 4k vids, not sure what the logic behind it is, but i believe this trick still works) so those are accessible to as many clients as possible (gotta make sure little timmy can watch mr. beast), but are slowly converting the rest to av1 only.
TL;DR Tower would need to fix this, as its highly unlikely google will back out of the change, and the problem will probably only grow as time goes on. In the meantime, if you want to fix any videos you own, you need to upload them in 4k resolution, any others you’d have to download, upscale, and reupload.
Its only gotten better for me. I used to hardly be able to play any videos in Tower, even ones I uploaded myself but they randomly started working again the past several months.
I still find videos that won’t play, but not nearly as much as I used to.
and ya can vouch for the 4k trick. if you’re not a YT partner it’ll use the worse codec on 1080p videos but 4k videos always force the better one so always upload in that.
If they randomly started working it’s likely it wasn’t this specific bug, probably just a random delivery issue, otherwise the video possibly met whatever metric YouTube has other than views to make them offer the extra format.
I still stand by what I said, though eventually YouTube will switch over increasingly more videos to av1, and the problem will grow.
The exclusive support of webm/vp9 is something unique to chromium/blink based stuff as its googles format so they bundle in support for that (and since they crated it, av1 as well), which makes me assume that’s what’s behind TUs player, which is why this has confused me from the start, as whatever they use should just ship with the av1 support.
That said though I’ve no experience in game design or unreal engine 
I don’t think the TU team is so naive as to just have forgotten to click an “update dependency” button or something for the player, I’m clueless as to what the actual underlying technology is, just my observed limitations and interactions of it.
I agree with what’s been said above, it may seem benign but watching videos together is a fun core feature of this game!
Would love to see some clarification from the team other than “YouTube changed codecs and we can’t control that”, we know what codecs have changed, and it’s not gotten any more complex than some videos being av1av1c* only now.
The issue started because Youtube for whatever reason completely nuked a lot of VP9 encodes and this left a significant amount of videos with only h.264 (avc1), not even AV1. Not saying AV1 won’t be an issue but the “Error” problem was mostly because a lot of videos that only had h.264 and VP9 suddenly didn’t have VP9 versions. They’ve slowly started adding vp9 back to pretty much everything (though some of these don’t have opus audio yet so it still falls back to h.264 on tower, it’s all just taking time though), but the return is rolling out about as slowly as the removal happened.
I’m sure in some cases the VP9 removal led to only an AV1 fallback but at least in my experience these uploads were most often stuck with h.264/AVC.
No idea why this happened in the first place considering avc1 is ancient and you would expect them to move forward with av1 or at least vp9 only if they are going to do this sort of thing, but they’re fixing it regardless, and it doesn’t seem like they’re leaning on just AV1 at least not currently.
Good catch! I’ll be revising my previous posts to remove misinformation, completely missed that. So many similar letters 
avc1, av1, av1c, blehhhh.
No worries, it’s extremely confusing. Codec names in general are weird.
I kinda wish you were right though because at least then it would make sense. I can’t tell if Google was testing something out or just genuinely messed something up.
Whatever they were doing, we just happen to be a part of an extremely small % of people actually impacted by it because most software interfacing with Youtube has h.264 support. Slowly getting fixed but still it borderline ruined media sharing for the last year +
Frustrating stuff…
