They recently changed it so that if the player is less than 200×200 (which really means 356×200 at 16:9) then when you press play, it just says "player is too small."
At least, it does that sometimes. I assume this means that this fucked up change has been rolled out to some of their servers but not all.
So the only way to make my web site's layout work with this new restriction is to remove the videos entirely.
I'm sure that's exactly the result they were hoping for. Well played, asshats.
Also, can anyone tell me why none of my Youtube iframe video embeds will play at all on iPhone/iPad any more, no matter what size they are? Now they display the "play button with a slash through it" and run the spinner continuously. This used to work, and nothing on my side has changed.
I ran into something like this (not playing on mobile) - not sure if this is your situation. I uploaded a video of my kid making funny faces, shot with Diana Ross playing in the background. Evidently, Universal Music decided it couldn't be played on mobile (since they can't monetize it) - I guess they have some sort of Shazam-like system that automatically recognizes works they own and flags them as not allowed.
Did your clips have music in them? (I would assume so)
No, nothing plays at all. Click my mpegs tag and click any video. I just tried the first 22 of them. Not a single one plays on iOS.
The three videos currently on the front page all play for me. They appear to be less than 200x200
See the part where I said it doesn't happen all the time?
Yep, they all play here too (in Firefox Aurora from a few days ago), and I don't have Flash.
It is possible that it is another YouTube bug, or indeed a change that they might not have rolled out everywhere. Annoying, for sure.
Playing around in web inspector, if you just bump the max-width of .page and set a min-width on .left you should be all set (and it looks pretty good, too).
For the videos to play, .left (and thus the menu and everything else over there) would have to be 356 pixels wide. That's insane.
[Disclaimer: My other e-mail address is @google.com, I'm not speaking for them]
It looks like the 200px requirement was announced in March, starting to roll out in late April (per this YouTube API blog post) and is documented in the requirements section of the Javascript API reference.
Be that as it may, it's still stupid and horrible.
Really stupid, imagine if this had happened for images and it had become normal for web sites like the DNA Lounge site to actually keep the photographs and icons they used on their own site rather than pushing that onto a server belonging to somebody else and then trying to figure out how to avoid any adverts playing to pay for that server...
Wait a minute.
Oh.
Do they speak English on What?
You will probably not think this is very funny, but the Youtube embeds on the Hangouts tab of Google+ are only 156px high.