[SoFloFreeper]

Thanks in advance.

[Army Air Corps]

I had the same thing happen to me a couple of times today.

[kingattax]

what are you searching for ? small rectangles are usually in place of chinese characters.

[r-q-tek86]

I get the same thing

[MHGinTN]

Try opening Real Player and in the search box upper right type WEB, then when the next screen comes up type http://www.youtube.com

[MHGinTN]

Try opening Real Player and in the search box upper right type WEB, then when the next screen comes up type http://www.youtube.com

If you know the URL or hyperlink addy for the youtube video you seek, put that in, instead of the http://www.youtube.com command.

[Company Man]

Thought it was just me; I system restored back about 36 hours and the problem didn’t re-occur

[Jacknudy]

Could you possibly have accidentally chosen a different default language? On the main Youtube page, scroll to the bottom, and there’ll be a dropdown list next to Language. Make sure you have English selected.

[MSU]

This is a character set issue. The little rectangle is displayed any time a character to be displayed is not in the character set in use. See this link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928847 for a discussion of possible causes.

[RebelTex]

I had that same problem earlier after my system lost power and I rebooted. It might be related to either cookies or some java settings.

Whatever it was, I resolved it as follows.

I clicked on the youtube link in the article and got the same thing you describe.

I then clicked on a known good link I had saved on my system - it played just fine.

I compared them and found that my good link had /watch_popup? in the url and the bad one only had /watch? in the url. Here’s an example (this link is short and very funny, heheh):

bad link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeXMxuNNlE8&feature=g-logo-xit

good link: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=NeXMxuNNlE8&feature=g-logo-xit

I clicked on the bad link and then edited it (in the address bar) to include _popup then hit enter, it worked fine. After doing this a few times, the original bad link started working which made me think it was either no cookie or a bad cookie or bad Java setting or something similar.

Anyway, system now back to normal, LOL.

[StevieB]

Had the same/similar problem early this morning -- on both a PC running Windows 7 and a Mac running OSX Lion.

This afternoon I tried again and things worked fine -- on both systems.

I changed nothing. I just put the problem off until I had a chance to review the issue.

Might have been a problem at YouTube?

[bramps]

I just had the same problem. I was trying to watch an old film noir movie named ‘Footsteps In The Fog’. My solution was to put all of these words in the google searchbar:
footsteps in the fog youtube.

Worked like a charm. Hopefully a temporary youtube problem...but then again maybe someone just emptied my bank account.

[Ben Ficklin]

I’m still having that same problem

[Ben Ficklin]

I’m still having that same problem