[Question] "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported." - inv_sig_helper missing

[DUOLabs333]

Solution here: #4947 (comment)

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Describe the bug
For almost all videos (shorts and a few other videos seem to be immune), I started getting this error: "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported." This started about 2 days ago.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Go to https:///watch?v=tPTvG0Se7L8
2. See error

Logs

Screenshots

Additional context

• Browser (if applicable): Chrome 120
• OS (if applicable): macOS 11

I tried adding the po_token and visitor_data from https://github.com/iv-org/youtube-trusted-session-generator, but it didn't help.

Switching to master-arm64 also didn't help.

[DUOLabs333]

Oh, I think it does work, but cached videos (even those that were opened unsuccessfully) are not sent to the helper.

Yeah, truncation was needed (I remembered the command --- psql -d invidious -c 'TRUNCATE TABLE videos')

Are you managing your containers in Portainer?

No, I use my own scripts.

[unixfox]

Also fixed the problem for me (also for previously failed videos); also did not know that this was needed. It's in the install docs already, but I didn't know it changed/had an update.

Some sort of notification for new install requirements would be cool!

Thanks for the info/fix :)

Invidious has releases now! With a changelog of what changed: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/releases/tag/v2.20240825

So there were technically an announcement back in the end of august.

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So you need to add inv_sig_helper and potoken now. By following the updated documentation: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/

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potoken and inv_sig_helper are not an hard requirement since some IP address may still work on the old method.

If you haven't followed there were actually a constant fight against youtube from June to September: #4734.

Invidious lost for the moment and the IP addresses of most datacenter are blocked.

[MSWS]

If anyone wants to keep rotating the tokens, I wrote this small script which you can run in a cronjob:

output=$(docker run quay.io/invidious/youtube-trusted-session-generator)

visitor_data=$(echo "$output" | awk -F': ' '/visitor_data/ {print $2}')
po_token=$(echo "$output" | awk -F': ' '/po_token/ {print $2}')

sed -i "s/visitor_data:.*/visitor_data: $visitor_data/" docker-compose.yml
sed -i "s/po_token:.*/po_token: $po_token/" docker-compose.yml

docker compose up -d invidious

A small enhancement I made to this script allows for specifying these variables in a .env instead of in the compose directly. Also added the --rm flag so we don't create a dangling container every time.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

output=$(docker run --rm quay.io/invidious/youtube-trusted-session-generator)

visitor_data=$(echo "$output" | awk -F': ' '/visitor_data/ {print $2}')
po_token=$(echo "$output" | awk -F': ' '/po_token/ {print $2}')

sed -i "s/VISITOR_DATA=.*/VISITOR_DATA=$visitor_data/" [PATH]/.env
sed -i "s/PO_TOKEN=.*/PO_TOKEN=$po_token/" [PATH]/.env

docker compose -f [PATH]/compose.yml up --force-recreate -d