Why is it that most videos no longer work for me. Some examples are YouTube Videos, IMDB trailers. etc. Everything was working fine and then things started changing. I am using Windows 7. I was using Windows Media player and I tried other options but nothing seems to help.

So, let me understand here. If you go to YouTube, a video will not play? You certainly don't use Media Player for on-line videos, only for playing videos from a DVD. Or maybe I'm not understanding your question.

My computer default player was set to Windows media player. I changed that and tried 2 other default players and that didn't help. Yes if I go to YouTube very few things will play. Same thing with movie trailers.

From what I understand video in YouTube plays in the FLV format and Media Player plays video in WMV format, so a conversion has to occur. But you don't need a media player to watch on-line video. I don't even Media Player on one of my older computers and it plays YouTube videos and movie trailers just fine. Some websites use Flash, so you might want to make sure that is up to date or isn't being blocked.

When I'm streaming Prime video to my PC, I'm not using a media player, but it's playing through my browser. If you are using the old IE11 on Windows 7, try using the Firefox browser.

I might be totally off base here... maybe Jenny will know more.

Most times I try to play some kind of video I get a message "This video file cannot be played" along with an error code.

In the last couple of weeks when I try to play a video on YouTube, I get a message saying that, "An error has occurred. Please try again later." However, after several seconds of nothing, the video starts playing. This message occurs with Firefox. When I try it with Chrome, I don't get an error message.

What is the error code, Geo?

error code 224003

Have you tried using more than one web browser to see if you get the same results?

And especially if, like I said in my post above, if he is using the old IE11 on Windows 7.

I am using what ever came with Win-7. No I haven't tried other browsers. It is important to me that I have my favorites available so I haven't changed. I don't know how to get my favorites list on a new browser. I will probably be switching to a Win-10 machine soon and it will have a newer browser.

I would strongly suggest trying Firefox or Chrome. You can import Favorites into a new browser... when you install it, normally is asks if you want to import Favorites from IE 11.

I'm seeing a lot in my web searches that more and more websites are not supporting IE 11. Don't know if that's your problem, but really... trying another browser is about the only way to find out.

I fixed my problem with YouTube and Firefox a few minutes ago through googling. I ended up having to disable hardware acceleration (which is checked by default) under Performance in the Firefox settings. Now the YouTube videos start right up.

This is tangential, but I am throwing it out there in case it helps someone else who might be reading this.

That's great, Marian. I hope Geo tries another browser to see if IE 11 is the problem.

Interesting. When I check under Performance in the General settings, this is all I had...


Use recommended performance settings. These settings are tailored to your computer’s hardware and operating system.

I believe I had to unclick the recommended performance settings to get the hardware thing to show up. Or maybe it was something else; I just remember that by default the hardware thing did not initially show up for me either.

At any rate, I spoke too soon. The videos played normally for several hours on YouTube but now I am still getting that message from time to time, just not all the time. So, a small improvement but not a total fix. Seems to be a Firefox issue because I don't get the message at all using Chrome.