Android: Fix for YouTube "There was a problem while playing. Tap to retry" - Videos Stop Playing After a Few Days

This was an annoying issue plaguing me for the past year or so. I don't know exactly when it started happening or why, but there are numerous posts and issue trackers for it scattered around the internet without a solid fix.

The problem

The official YouTube app suddenly decides to stop working about 2 days after rebooting the phone. There's no real information available (as a user) to figure out what's wrong.

All it says is "There was an error while playing. Touch to Retry".

Oh but not to worry, you're still able to watch YouTube ads before the actual video itself.

For those more technically inclined, here's what the stack trace looks like when YouTube freaks the hell out:

Fixes that I've tried

Over the year, nothing I tried works aside from restarting the phone. That was the only thing that kept YouTube working, other than just watching it via the browser which bypasses the app altogether.

In case you've stumbled upon this guide while running into an entirely different issue, here are a few things that may get YouTube working again:

Clearing cache and data for YouTube	didn't work
Uninstalling and reinstalling YouTube	didn't work
Downgrading to an older version of YouTube	didn't work - I went all the way back from v11 to v6
Removing current WiFi details and adding it back	didn't work - some people believe this works
As mentioned above, restarting the phone	works for about 2 days. You'll find it frustrating after putting up with an ad and it doesn't work again
Using a web browser to play the video	Works consistently, but it's not as good as the app

The Solution!

Only until last week did I manage to find a new suggestion on XDA forums. I tried it out, gave it a few days and surprisingly it still works!

Unfortunately, it requires you to have root access to your Android device. I guess there's only so much you can do before you have to dig deeper to fix these sort of issues.

What you need to do is rename a few system files and restart the phone.

1. Open up a file explorer capable of browsing system folders. If your phone doesn't have one, I recommend FX File Explorer as it comes with root explorer mode.
2. Navigate your way to /system/etc/firmware/
3. Rename the following files to add ".bak":
   

   tzwidevine.b00	tzwidevine.b00.bak
   tzwidevine.b01	tzwidevine.b01.bak
   tzwidevine.b02	tzwidevine.b02.bak
   tzwidevine.b03	tzwidevine.b03.bak
   tzwidevine.mdt	tzwidevine.mdt.bak

   
   
4. Restart your phone.
5. Make YouTube great again! You shouldn't have any more issues with watching silly videos again after doing this.

Source

Video playback issue - Post #4

YouTube: Finally fixed slow loading during peak hours and some videos don't load at all

For months I've been wondering why the hell my YouTube kept buffering during peak hours.

At first I thought it was my ISP oversubscribing users on high data plans, but it was during the peak periods so that didn't quite make sense. (Australia doesn't quite have truly unlimited internet plans yet.)

So after contacting my ISP and getting some generic responses back like:

• Check your firewall
• Antivirus subscription
• Windows Updates
• No Peer 2 Peer programs running
• Speedtest on another computer
• Isolation test (unplug all telephony devices except for router/modem)

I didn't bother with trying out another modem, because it had been working fine the whole time and the problem was only during certain hours of the day.

Eventually I figured it out. For some time now I had configured my router to use OpenDNS. At first it was not an issue, but I guess something changed and it couldn't cope with the stress.

Disabling the use of OpenDNS and reverting back to the DNS hosts provided by the ISP worked wonders. Once again the videos stream without buffering.

Youtube: Link to video and also time it starts playing from

Its easy enough to send somebody a YouTube link, but when a video contains a bunch of crap at the start or you want to skip straight to the good part, its handy to know how to skip straight to the bits that are interesting.

Take for example this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBdsvmcZUC0

If I wanted to show the fun parts of the video that start at 0:51, I'd have to tell the person "Hey, watch this and skip to 0:51 because theres a bunch of stupid kids at the beginning that nobody cares about".

They'd have to open the video, wait for it to load and then drag the cursor to the given time. That's annoying.

Instead, we can just give them the slightly modified link that'll skip straight to the time given. We add an anchor called "#at=51" at the end of the url so now it should look like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBdsvmcZUC0#at=51

Now the link given will skip straight to the 51st second of the video.

If the time you're skipping to is over a minute, then you'll have to convert the time to the number of seconds.

For example, skipping to 2m30s takes converts into 150 seconds. The link is now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBdsvmcZUC0#at=150

Another great example would be this video ;)