YouTube videos fail to play, entering an indefinite buffering loop or displaying a “Content no longer available” error message. This appears to be a selective enforcement issue by YouTube’s server-side ad injection. Disabling Brave Shields immediately resolves the issue, but re-enabling them causes the playback to hang again.
Steps to reproduce
Open Brave with Shields set to “Aggressive” or “Standard.”
Observe the player stuck on a black screen with a loading spinner or an error message.
Disable Brave Shields for the site and refresh; notice that the video plays immediately (with ads).
Actual result
The video player hangs indefinitely or throws a playback error. The “blocked items” counter in Shields often spikes rapidly during this state.
Expected result
The video should play without ads and without a buffering delay.
Reproduces how often
Easily reproduced
Brave version (brave://version info)
1.88.136 Chromium: 146.0.7680.164 Official Build
Miscellaneous information
OS: Windows 11
Testing: Problem persists in Private/Incognito windows but is resolved when Shields are disabled. Standalone extensions like uBlock Origin (with Shields off) do not seem to trigger the same “hang” as Brave’s native Shields.
All brave components are up to date. Current filter lists are officially being bypassed.
There is no permanent fix, it’s constantly being worked on. So chill out, relax and stop being pushy and wait your turn, k? In fact, while you wait your turn, search the forum a little better next time: YouTube videos aren't loading anymore - #2 by Mattches
Let’s be clear, updating filter lists is a surface level triage step that I’ve already confirmed fails to address this specific regression. If a simple filter update solved the issue, I wouldn’t be here.
This is a shields engine failure where the native Rust based ad blocker is being bypassed by YouTube’s current server side injection. A behaviour that is not present in uBlock Origin on the same build. That indicates a core component desync, not a ‘wait your turn’ list update.
I’ve documented the build specific logs in the GitHub issue for the developers. Unless you have a technical contribution beyond ‘chill out’ and ‘click update’ you’re just adding noise to a legitimate bug report. I’ll wait for @Mattches or a member of the filter team who actually understands the difference between a broken list and a bypassed component. Thanks.
Can’t upload test evidence due to being a new user here.
However i tested on the latest Nightly build (Brave 1.90.86 Official Build nightly 64-bit Chromium: 147.0.7727.25) with zero extensions as requested. The video playback issues and ‘content unavailable’ errors are resolved on this build, which confirms this was an engine level regression in Stable and not a simple filter list desync.
Note: While playback is fixed, the Shields dialog UI is currently spazzing, the block counter is incrementing so rapidly it’s causing the popup to flicker/glitch. This suggests the engine is catching a high frequency injection loop that the Stable engine is currently missing or failing to handle.
My GitHub issue report here now has multiple users confirming the exact same behaviour on Stable. This isn’t an isolated case.
Since the fix is clearly already present in the Nightly engine, can we get an ETA on when this ad blocker logic will be backported or pushed to Stable? The current Stable engine is definitely being bypassed.