Thursday, July 30, 2009

YouTube strikes again

For the past few days, the thumbnail server code that tells an embedded player which thumbnails to show seems to think you can nest a jpeg inside another jpeg. If you're here, or on any other site with embedded YouTube videos, for that matter, the player still works but the screen appears blank and black. Just hit the play button on the second player below to confirm that. This bug is presently discussed in a fair bit of detail on the YouTube Help Forums.

The following player should work (it's not from YouTube):

Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti from Shadowgate Imageworks on Vimeo.

Albemarle Senior Choir performs Gioachino Rossini's "Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti" (Comic Duet for Two Cats). Performance at Miller Chapel, on the grounds of the Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, Saturday, July 18, 2009. Marianna Parnas-Simpson, Albemarle musical director, conducting.

This next one will work (I predict) once the code is fixed:


And so it did.

There are also so many videos being corrupted since the shift a month ago to 2GB uploads that it's stopped being funny... and I had a really great sense of humor about this stuff. That sense of humor, though, has been eroding lately, probably due to my sense of downright exhaustion, trying to field user questions and pass along pithy (or immensely verbose) observations to YouTube staff. A staff that at present seem to be dealing with far too many fires at once to be able to do more than respond haphazardly to the handful of users they've allowed to "bubble up" issues for their attention.

One more vid for the lolcat fans out there:



If I weren't so messed up in the head, I would have probably stopped doing this a few months ago, for the sake of any shreds of sanity that still remain. Unfortunately I find this whole phenomenon mesmerizing. Who knows, maybe I can turn the experience into a screenplay?

We don't really need to go into that just now, do we? I think I'll be perverse and stick two embedded players for the same videos into this post (see above), just so I can more readily see if and when the coding has been fixed.

2 comments:

  1. Hello,
    I see your post here, I read the YouTube help forums dated from last year. The topic is now closed as this is fixed (so they say). But it's not, I have this issue still today on one of my videos. Exactly how does one fix this as I don't see a solution anywhere? I also don't see the double url link as mentioned on the YT forum. The video I have that is black can be seen on my site here: http://www.wesleytack.com/?category_name=about

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  2. @WesleyTack It's not entirely clear to me at the moment if this is the same issue, or a new twist. Please don't hesitate to start a new thread on the help forums about the issue you're having. I'll try to check out what you've reported, and the link you've given. This is a thread that was almost 2 years old at this point.

    Not to dismiss anything... I'm just trying to get a clear picture now of what the issue is for you specifically, and see if anyone else may also be reporting it. Never a shortage of bugs on YouTube, it seems.

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