YouTube - "An Error has occured, please try again later"

I had a very weird issue today, where a member of staff couldn't play a YouTube video. They kept getting the "snowy" background and the error "An Error has occurred, please try again later" after the video played for a second or two. This behavior is exhibited in IE only. Chrome seems to work fine.



I tracked the issue down to the fact that the PC the user had, had no speakers connected. "So what?" i here you say, well it turns out that for some reason when using IE you MUST have an audio device installed and connected. This is different to some reports that suggested it was because of an incompatible audio driver, or an out of date driver. 

The issue rears its ugly head even if you have the latest drivers, but don't have anything plugged in. By default when installing Windows and you don't have an Audio driver, Windows installs a basic driver. This driver by default will only be used if something is plugged into the jack. This can also be the case when running an RDP session to the PC, unless you configure RDP to allow the audio. 

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Resolution

I have found a few different fixes around so i thought i would put a summary of them up here.

1. The first fix i thought of was the simplest. It involves simply plugging in a set of speakers or headphones into the jack. Not ideal, especially if you have a few hundred PC's to fix.


2. Next was, the fix to simply use Chrome. Well i shouldn't have to do that!


3. A feature in the Realtek Codec is to  "Disable Front Panel Jack Detection". This means that instead of the OS waiting for you to plug something in, it already assumes something is there. This tricks YouTube into thinking you have an audio device plugged in. We have several hundred PC's of the same model, so i created a registry entry (below) and deployed it using SCCM. There is a couple of variations on this depending on the MOBO manufacturer/chipset.

Viglen with an MSI motherboard 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000\Settings

change the HEX value 

Name - JackCtrl

Data - ff,c6,00,00

Other models

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/ControlClass/{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/000/GlobalSettings

and change the decimal value

Name - EnableDynamicDevices
Data - 0

Note - Don't forget to reboot after