2nd May 2016, 2 min read

No YouTube Videos on Google Chrome v50

After upgrading to Google Chrome version 50 I could hear sound in YouTube videos, but no images/video. At first I thought this was a matter just affecting me. Now I noticed that another machine which I upgraded to Google Chrome v50 also lost the ability to watch video in YouTube. This other machine had a different graphic setup, so the problem was not something related just to my graphic-card configuration. The same problem is true for Chromium. For some time I switched to Firefox, which does not suffer from this hitch.

Luckily I had yet another machine which still had a working Google Chrome v49 browser. I used the very handy fakepkg program written by Gordian Edenhofer to make an Arch package from this v49 installation, see also pacman/Tips and tricks and the bacman command. And voilà, I can now downgrade to a usable Google Chrome version, whenever there is a need:

pacman -U google-chrome-49.0.2623.112-1.pkg.tar.xz

I called

fakepkg google-chrome

which after two minutes generated google-chrome-49.0.2623.112-1.pkg.tar.xz. These two minutes are mostly due to compressing with xz.

Google Chrome is in AUR. I recommend to set

PKGDEST=/var/cache/aur

in /etc/makepkg.conf, so AUR packages are cached, very similar to the "normal" packages.

Use

pacaur -Syu --ignore google-chrome

to ignore updates for Google Chrome, or use IgnorePkg=google-chrome in /etc/pacman.conf, see Skip package from being upgraded.

See also Google Chrome Became a Performance Hog.

Update 04-Jun-2016: Chromium 51.0.2704.63 is fine again, i.e., it shows video.