Been trying out Google Chrome as a new browser. Yesterday seemed fine-ish (I’m not completely sold on it), but today all of a sudden YouTube vids are “unavailable”. Any ideas?
Nope. I’ve been using Chrome for a few months now. Current up-to-date version is working fine here, including YT. How are you trying to access the vids?
The usual: links, searches. I was watching one music vid that I’ve watched many a time before; tried to back it up for a repeat of one particular run of notes, it froze up, and I got the “unavailable” display. Other vids I know I’ve watched before are also unavailable to me now.
I’m not sure it’s across the board, so I’ll have to do more checking. Yesterday was jidai-geki movies, and everything was tickety-boo, as they say. Seems like this just started today, though. And I can’t access my default page, MSN dot com. That’s also a new development.
Hm, interesting. I’ve been using Chrome for months now and I haven’t had that problem either. I can’t say its faster than the Mozilla that I was using before, but I like the way it works better. The AdBlock add-on is really nice too! 
Okay, today the vids are available. I suppose the only answer is to call it a mystery. Just so long as this isn’t going to be a recurring mystery I have to face…
MSN is still unavailable. It was available at first with Chrome. Yes, I know: MSN is unworthy of my better parts (my worse parts don’t care for it all that much, either). It shamelessly wallows in the vapid and trite like a dog in poo and it’s a journalistic embarrassment, but it’s MY journalistic embarrassment. I want to be the one to abandon it, not have it taken from me.
I’ve used Chrome since it first became available. Nano, what operating system are you using, Win 8 maybe? Chrome should not be run from the “desktop” in Windows 8. It should run native (as we were all meant to run). It freezes if started from the desktop.
If your not on Win 8 and you have issues with Chrome and the flashplayer again try this. In the address line of the browser type “chrome://plugins”. That will result in a list of loaded plugins available to you. Adobe Flash should show up. If there is an “Enable” box just click on it and you should be good to go. Adobe flash is embedded in Chrome but for some reason lately I’ve seen it getting disabled (Evil MS Empire?). So see if it is enabled or not.
Feadoggie
Windows XP, as I recall.
Unsure what “run native” means, but if this is a Win 8 and not an XP issue, tell me anyway. I’m curious. 
Okay, I’ll take a look at that. Thanks!
All right, looks to me like Adobe Flash must be enabled, because the choices offered to me are a clicky saying “Disable” and an unchecked box for “Always allowed”. Dunno the particular implications of the latter, but if I’m reading the former right, then all my plugins are enabled.
Hmm.
Nano, the “Always allowed” clicky seems to be a separate and further qualifier of the “Enable/Disable” clicky. I don’t think I have the “Always Allowed” selected on any plugins but I have had to “Enable” the flash player. It seems that around the time Adobe released version X of their player I ran into this. Might have been some version mismatch between Adobe and Google. But I’ve not had any other issues lately with Chrome, YMMV of course.
I still have a couple machines running Windows XP around here and Chrome has worked fine on those.
The “running native” thing in Windows 8 is about the new interface in Windows 8. If a program is not compatible with the new interface it run in compatibility mode on what looks like a Windows 7 desktop.
Feadoggie
Thanks. Will probably have more questions later, if I know me.
Maybe some mean person setup a proxy server so your requests don’t go to the server they should.
What happens when you enter this in the address bar:
chrome://settings/search#proxy
I’m a little curious what you mean by “unavailable”. Do you only see a white screen with some text saying that page is unavailable, or the regular youtube page but where the video should be is a message that says “this video is unavailable”?
If the latter, I would expect that someone has set you up a proxy that’s outside the country and so Youtube thinks you’re not an American and not worthy of its copyright protection.
I get this: “Google Chrome is using your computer’s system proxy settings to connect to the network.”, and a clicky to change proxy settings.
My original complaint was about the latter, but that seems to have cleared up. But I’m also just getting “page unavailable” notices in general, mainly about how there’s some kind of trouble with the DNS server. That’s been happening more lately with my earlier browser, and is why I made the switch to Chrome to see if that made any difference. Apparently, it hasn’t; if anything, it’s maybe even worse.
I hope I don’t need a new computer…
You could try clicking the button (“clicky” if you prefer) to see what the current proxy setup is. If your system is using a proxy server and you did not set that up yourself, a virus probably might have set that up for you. They do that sometimes so they can keep you from googling things like “How do I get rid of this virus?”
DNS problems don’t have anything to do with what browser you’re using. In order for your browser to know where to look for an address like “http://google.com”, it has to ask Windows to translate “google.com” into a numerical IP address like 74.125.137.101
To do this translation Windows has to ask a computer called a DNS server to make the translation. If the DNS server your computer is pointing to has gone down, then you can’t get anywhere because your computer doesn’t know what “google.com” means anymore.
Last year, the FBI decommissioned a DNS server that it had seized from a virus maker. The virus was called DNSChanger:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSChanger
…because it changed your DNS server setup to point to its own servers. After seizing it in a raid, the FBI was keeping it up so that the infected computers did not suddenly lose internet (clever, right?) but finally decided it was too expensive and shut it off, thus causing infected computers to lose the internet.
Maybe you’re in a situation like that?
This page talks about how to check (and change) your DNS server settings in XP.
http://www.mediacollege.com/computer/network/dns.html
Great, thanks. I’ll see what I can do with this.