no audio on youtube

dammit youtube/google, will you EVER stop having problems and work correctly? youtube is starting to remind me of those bikes in the first judge dredd movie where they said it's yours to own if you can ever get it working right. well, something along those lines. >.> anyway...

first off, the usual info, firefox 32.0.3, my flash is all up to date and the volume bar on youtube is at 3/4 so i shouldbe able to hear the audio fine right? wrong, the videos (pretty much any length) usually load 1-5 seconds with audio as per normal then it stops to buffer and poof, goodbye all audio while the video otherwise loads perfectly fine (albeit with more buffering >.>).

most of the time i'm forced to use this youtube video downloader program (google it if you want to check it out. no malware or anything, i've been using it for years i think and its safe) to download videos off of youtube THEN watch them with audio and yes, that is as stupid as it sounds. its a waste of time just to watch something that should already load up correctly in the browser.

Have you tried using a different web browser, like Internet Explorer or Chrome? It's possible that it's specifically a firefox related issue, in which case I'd recommend reinstalling it and seeing if that helps. You can also try switching to the HTML5 player for youtube using this link; https://www.youtube.com/html5. Just click the blue "Request the HTML5 player" button about halfway down the page, then try watching videos again.

html5...hmmm...

this browser (firefox) supports: (blue check mark) htmlvideoelement, h.264, webm vp8 and doesn't support (i'm assuming here, red X) media source extensions, mse & h.264, mse & webm vp9. o.O eh? whats the default i wonder as i've never bothered to look into this...or really dig through much of any of er...youtubes settings and menus since the last major overhaul of its overall layout. well, whatever, i'll give this a try and see if it helps any.

edit: seems to be loading properly and not dropping the sound (testing a 2nd video currently), guess i'll stick with this as it seems to work. huh, well thats interesting. seems it limits you to 360P or 720P on HD and has a speed setting on this player. well, its working and loading MUCH better now with far less buffering so as far as i'm concerned, whatever the default player uses, its inferior in some ways.

edit2: O.O holy crap! its loading HD quality with no major issues aside from the usual buffering (predictable and minor issue). i don't even remember the last time i got a HD video to load without problem on youtube.

Firefox should support Flash playback on YT just fine, but it might be the particular version of Firefox causing issues.

I use FireFox as well myself and can play back Flash videos on YouTube with no problem whatsoever. (Including 1080p and even higher than that).


Another possibility could be that it's Flash itself as well. I had an issue last year with one of the updated Flash versions where YouTube would just function like crap. I had to revert back to an older version to get it to work properly again until they released yet another update.

Maybe try a different version of Flash? Or a different version of Firefox as well. (I'm using v28.0 myself, because I hate the extra stuff coming with versions beyond that LOL).