Eastfist

Because Google has been trying to phase out dependency on Adobe’s Flash technology in favor of the free, open-source HTML5 standard player, YouTube (owned by Google) has been up to some shady tactics. The transition to HTML5 isn’t seamless as they may think or trying to force. Theoretically, browsers that do support HTML5 should automatically choose the correct format, but users usually find themselves with broken media experience.

This is an example of typical YouTube video url:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF5jXrZfuCA

Notice the query string for the video itself is:

?v=VF5jXrZfuCA

So this is what you can try to get the Flash player working again:

Append this query string to your YouTube video:

?nohtml5=False

So it would be something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF5jXrZfuCA?nohtml5=False

It seems the monkeys at YouTube play around with too many query strings and they all do the same thing, or some are just meant to leave you stranded.

There may be YouTube video urls with:

?noFlash = true
?flash = flash

Or whatever query string, that will revert the dependency back to flash. But in most cases it may break the functionality because those monkeys aren’t agreeing on a single query string, but rather multiple implemenations or deliberately creating deadends.

Either way, give this a try and see if it works out for you. It does for me (for now, I guess). Good luck!