Youtube stopped working in Pale Moon

[sindi]

Two evenings ago smtube suddenly stopped working (the URL could not be found) in three versions of puppy linux. It did not help to reinstall the OS or smtube, update smtube from 15 to 17, or update cacert.pem, or change to three other computers.
Smtube listed available videos but would not play them.

That same evening Palemoon could play videos but only at 360p (even with the line about 'obsolete' in about:config changed to true).

The next day Palemoon (27.6) could no longer access any Youtube videos, in Linux (SSE version) or Windows 7 (endless moving circle).
Firefox 45.8 ESR and Seamonkey 2.46 play Youtube videos in puppy linux (at multiple resolutions). Vidmate still works on android phone.

I was also unable to download with youtube-dl. Parameter error.

Someone at Puppy Linux said to update smtube from 15 to 18 (which requires libQt5 libraries that we do not have) because Youtube just changed its code again.

Please confirm the problem. Is anyone working on a solution?

[sindi]

Today, on at least one particular computer. Palemoon is now playing Youtube videos with three versions of puppy linux:
Lucid puppy (Ubuntu 12 based), Tahr puppy (Ubuntu 14 based), Xenial puppy (Ubuntu 16 based - just installed).
Presumably I did something stupid but perhaps it is a hardware problem on the previous computer (I never used it for Youtube before).

Pale Moon 27.6.1 came with Xenial and it plays Youtube videos at all resolutions.
The other two Puppies have PM 27.6.2 and play only at 360p Auto.
I changed the line with 'obsolete' from False to True in about:config.

I don't mind if this entire post is deleted. It probably should not be here.

[stevenpusser]

SMPlayer stopped playing Youtube a couple days ago with the same error with the standard "auto" network stream settings; the 18.1.0 release was just put out to fix the problem. No doubt YT changed something that is causing the issue.

Have you tried fooling YT with a user agent spoof to get it play at a higher resolution?

[Walter Dnes]

Have you tried fooling YT with a user agent spoof to get it play at a higher resolution?

When all else fails, spoof the useragent. And spoof Windows instead of linux, while you're at it. In about:config set the two keys "general.useragent.override.googlevideos.com" and "general.useragent.override.youtube.com" both to
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0"
(without the quotes for the keys or the values).

With Firefox's rapid-release strategy, any version number you put in becomes subject to "your browser is out of date" messages in a couple of months. I keep one master version of a user.js file, and create symlinks into each profile directory. So I only have to edit one file, and the update propagates to all 20+ of my profiles.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Spoofing OS is a TERRIBLE idea. Figures Dnes would suggest it.

[Walter Dnes]

I find spoofing less "terrible" than seeing a blank webpage. Blame the idiot webmasters who insist on "a supported browser" on "a supported OS". I'm old enough to remember stuff like "This webpage best viewed with Internet Explorer 6 or higher in Windows 2000 or better".