Error 153 Video player configuration error on YouTube embeds

I recently noticed that almost every YouTube video on my blog was displaying the same mysterious error message:

In all cases the HTML looked something like this:

<iframe style="max-width: 100%" width="560" height="315"
  src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FgxwCaL6UTA"
  frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"> </iframe>

It turned out the solution may be to replace www.youtube.com/embed/ with www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/:

<iframe style="max-width: 100%" width="560" height="315"
  src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FgxwCaL6UTA"
  frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"> </iframe>

This mostly fixed the problem, as demonstrated by this page.

(Weirdly on some refreshes of the page I get the same error. I'm not sure why that is.)

Created 2025-09-30T10:07:00-07:00 · Edit