[German]Recently I stumbled upon a strange error. My Google Chrome browser suddenly refuse to play YouTube videos. I got an error code 400. Here are a few hints how to solve this issue.
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Description of the error
I've created some blog posts during the day and I've opened a lot of YouTube pages, to check some videos. Everything was ok. Then I interrupted my work and invoked Windows 7 power saving mode. Later on I decided to continue my work. But during an attempt, to play a YouTube video, I received the following error page.
400. That's an error.
Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request. That's all we know.
My attempt, to show a blog post with an integrated YouTube video, the section with this video was blank. No error message are displayed. Then I checked the situation with Slimjet portable. This browser was able to play the videos, so Windows could not be the cause.
How to fix error 400?
In a first step I tried the usual approaches: I terminated one of the numerous Google Chrome tasks in Windows Task Manager. Google Chrome then terminated the remaining processes and was closed. But after rebooting the browser, I was still unable to display videos.
Then I tried to delete the browser data in cache (without cookies), but wasn't successful. At this point I searched the Internet and came across many hits, one within the Google Chrome product forum (see). The article has been viewed more than 10.000 times – it seems, that this issues is wide spread. One user mentioned, that he found a way, to delete the cookies for Youtube.com in browser cache. Here are the steps provides within the Chrome forum:
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1. Use the cookies remove function in Google Chrome Settings. Therefor go to Settings > [Advance] > Privacy and security > Content settings
2. Then expand the Cookies entry within Content settings
3. Enter youtube.com into the search box shown below and delete all YouTube cookies found within the browser.
A bit more simple may be to type chrome: // settings/siteData into the browser's address bar and search for YouTube (see here). Then delete all YouTube cookie entries and try to view a YouTube video.
In my case, the settings tab shown within chrome didn't work well. Suddenly I didn't see any cookies, and the tab was dead. After closing the tab, I was able to view YouTube videos again for half an hour. Then the incident came back, so I deleted all cookies stored within the case. Then the issue has been fixed.
Too many Cookies?
After publishing the blog post, another German blog reader came back with a similar observation in Firefox. He wrote:
I know similar things from Firefox – using my website with WordPress and using the plugin Wordfence Security. About every half year I can't access my WP login page anymore with a similar error message.
If I then look in Firefox (currently 52. x ESR) under Settings – Privacy policy – Cookies and search for for my affected domain, then I find a lot of cookies there starting with wf_loginalerted_. At the moment I have 6 entries and still no problem, but when the error message appears, there are more than 20 cookies.
Since all associated Cookies are sent with the request of the web page, the amount of data becomes too large. Obviously the HTTP header increased in such a way that it becomes sometime too big for the addressed web server. After deleting these cookies, it works again for a longer period of time. I don't have to delete all cookies of the domain but only enough of these unnecessary remnants of previous sessions.
Maybe it's an explanation, why I run into this issue. I've already opened some YouTube tabs and send Windows 7 into energy saving mode. Then I re-invoked the machine at a later time. It seems, that the browser's cookies has been damaged during this operation. That remembers me, that I have some issues displaying some Microsoft Answers forum pages. I receive an error in Chrome, that the page isn't viewable. Testing it with other browsers shows me always, that the pages are reachable. After deleting the browser's Cookie cache, I was able to reach the MS answers forum.
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Look, I also faced the same issue. But when I create a new account on google chrome then my problem is solved.