Ubuntu – youtube videos say: “This video is currently unavailable.” when using Chrome

chromiumflashyoutube

I've seen a few similar questions on the web, but none of them solve the problem for me. Essentially random youtube videos won't play in the chrome browser, but work in firefox just fine. Sometimes they even work in chrome on a website that displays the video still hosted at youtube, but won't work if I visit the actual youtube page!

  • Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS
  • Chromium: Version 30.0.1599.114 Ubuntu 12.04 (30.0.1599.114-0ubuntu0.12.04.3)
  • Chromium plugin: Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202

Here's a few things I've already tried:

  • uninstall and reinstall all flash packages
  • disable all other chromium plugins (vlc, divx, etc.)
  • youtube html5 trial (in/out)
  • using an extension to change my user agent to not chrome on ubuntu

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I haven't found anyone else with such a persistent problem!

Best Answer

One thing that worked for me was disabling the "VLC Multimedia Plugin" in chrome://plugins. Then I discovered this question, which suggested replacing the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg package with chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra. One

sudo apt-get install chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

(which automatically removed the non--extra version) later and everything was working perfectly.