From the past few days, a new problem has been bugging me while using Google Chrome. When I play a video on YouTube, sometimes the video player display a black screen instead of playing the video, but the audio keeps playing in the background. I tried reloading the video, but the error persists until I restart my PC. However restarting my PC doesn’t doesn’t fix the bug permanently and it occurs again randomly.
Upon some research, I found out that the bug is related to the Flash player and fortunately it can be fixed by a simple workaround. For those who want to fix the black screen on youtube, here’s how you can do so.
How to Fix Black Video Screen on YouTube
- Step 1: Open Google Chrome.
- Step 2: Type in Chrome://Flags in the URL bar and press enter.
- Step 3: Press CTRL + F to bring up the search box and type in the following.
Disable hardware-accelerated video decode
Alternatively you can also search for the above flag manually.
- Step 4: Click on the Enable button below Disable hardware-accelerated video decode.
- Step 5: Click on the Relaunch Now button to restart Google Chrome.
That’s it, the black video screen bug should be fixed now. This fix works across all operating systems, be it Windows, Mac or Linux.
If you are using other web browsers such as firefox or Opera. you can switch to the HTML5 version of YouTube and the black video screen bug should be fixed. Simply go to the following link provided below and click on Request the HTML5 player. www.youtube.com/html5
