This has always gone away for me when I change my location in my vpn.

Yea, been having this BIGTIME. Even occurs on grayjay, and pipe apps (newpipe, etc.) Its aggravating. Can’t even download vids either, and the ones u have downloaded are held ransom until u turn it off too 😂 at least in my case. Fuck google.

I don’t believe anyone mentioned this yet so… here goes nothing, there is a suspicion that this is due to A/B testing

This is a bug report from the Invidious project; this is back in June 6 (so four months ago), but the hoster of a fairly large instance noted a very bizarre error message on the Invidious project…

Conclusion is that Youtube is very likely rolling out A/B testing of requiring all clients to login before viewing videos

Refreshing will probably work considering this is most likely result of an A/B test, but unfortunately I don’t see a way of this problem going away

Yeah. Our work endpoint is in AWS. YouTube hates that. So does reddit.

Oh that’s how they broke invidious

This can be a soft limit where Youtube limits the connection rate so that artificially inflating view count becomes more costly. There are inexpensive ‘services’ especially in India or Pakistan where you can buy human (like a whole internet cafe) view times to your scam video to make it float in suggestions and to promote a channel.

I don’t work for youtube so it is just a guess.

It’s a VPN thing. I have a work VPN that gives me the same error on piped API front ends like piped.video

If I use my regular device without a VPN the alt front ends work fine.

As much as it isn’t preferred, I can usually bypass the sign in shenanigans by going directly to the website to watch something without signing in. I usually only get the login prompt when going through my browser or a search engine.

Sometimes I get that prompt while on vpn. After refreshing the page, I’m able to see the video.