Can't play embedded YouTube videos

AlgorithMan

For some time now I had the problem that I couldn't play embedded YouTube videos (e.g. on patreon and gog.com). The frame would just display "Error 153" briefly and then go black.

Only yesterday figured out that this is caused by the BitDefender browser extension, which blocks a required cookie from youtube-nocookie.com

Whitelisting that domain in the settings of the extension fixed the problem for me. IMHO BitDefender should whitelist the domain out of the box, because this severely disrupts legitimate use-cases and was not easy to diagnose - even for a Pro like me.

Alexandru_BD

Hi,

Embedded youtube videos are basically a bundle of trackers in a trench coat. When a site embeds a youtube video, your browser doesn’t just load youtube.com. It usually also loads resources from privacy-enhanced mode, that's youtube-nocookie.com, googlevideo.com which is the actual video stream, tracking and ads, and player scripts, plus telemetry. Whitelisting such resources by default can morph into a technical messiness. Why? Because anti-trackers don’t know intent, only behavior. Trackers work on patterns and from a blocker’s point of view, youtube embeds look like third-party iframe, cross-site identifiers, persistent cookies, fingerprinting scripts, telemetry calls and ad infrastructure, as this is how they normally behave. So, the extension would have to say "yes, this looks like tracking… but we’ll trust it anyway". Which leads to the next problem. Most anti-trackers are built on the principle that nothing is trusted by default, and if it would come with pre-listed domains, this would not sit well with privacy-focused users, because the extension would lose credibility. So in this case, the tracker exception becomes bigger than the rule.
Whitelisting would mean that platforms instantly regain cross-site tracking on millions of users, and for many anti-trackers blocking by default is the entire point..

There's another core technical problem. Youtube doesn’t separate video from tracking, so there's no clear boundry between video-only and tracking-only, because youtube bundles everything into the same scripts and domains. Thus, the anti-tracker can’t safely say “Allow video, block tracking”, because they’re entangled.
However, like you noticed, the browser extension does provide ways of setting preferences and this usually solves the type of issues you have encountered.
For future reference, you can find more information on the Bitdefender Anti-tracker here:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/25583/

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/28500/

I hope the information is helpful.

Regards