September 22, 2012

One More Round on the YouTube Bleg

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I’m going to test everyone’s patience by taking one last shot at seeing if anyone can solve my YouTube problem. To recap: several weeks ago YouTube videos stopped playing on my computer. I’ve uninstalled Flash completely and reinstalled it. I’ve tried going back to a previous version of Flash. I’ve dumped my cache. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled my browser. Nothing has worked. Some YouTube videos play, while others simply display a blank black rectangle. I haven’t been able to figure out any pattern that accounts for which ones play and which ones don’t.

The obvious suspect is some kind of interaction between Flash and my Opera browser — and this is an especially good suspect since YouTube continues to work fine on Firefox. However, I don’t really have a clue what the problem here could be, so instead I want to ask about something else. It turns out that if I manually change the URL of a YouTube video, replacing “watch” with “v,” the URL is then redirected and the video plays in full screen mode. This works 100% of the time. So here’s my question: does anyone have any idea what’s happening here? What’s the significance of “v” in a YouTube URL?

UPDATE: I’m still not sure about the “v” thing, but I seem to have obtained a fix for my problem. Thanks to commenter Rajeev Raizada for the pointer!

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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