Recently I came across a Windows 10 computer on which nobody could watch Youtube videos when using the Firefox web browser. Everything had been already tried – installing Adobe Flash player, installing various media plugins, using older versions of Firefox – but when clicked on Youtube vidoes, it just showed a black screen with message – “Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available” along with some extra information and one link for more information.
Clicking on the link provided by Youtube only displayed that Firefox web browser did not support H.264 which is required for watching Youtube videos. It also mentions that it could be because of hardware problem or because of a particular Windows version. After some research it was found out that all this problem was because this computer was running Windows 10 N. The N editions of Windows do not come with any media components and therefore cause problems related to playing media of all kinds like this.
Here is how to fix it:
- Visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/mediafeaturepack.
- Select your version of Windows from the drop-down list such as “Version 1803”.
- Click on the links displayed to download 32-bit version or the 64-bit version of Media Feature Pack depending on whether you are running 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows in your PC.
- Double-click on the downloaded update file to install it in your Windows PC and then reboot your computer.
- After restart, your Windows PC should be able to play Youtube videos in Mozilla Firefox web browser.
The N editions of Windows 10 do not include Windows Media Player and all the related technologies including the ability to play music, videos and the DRM content. But you can get all these features in your PC by installing Media Feature Pack. These packs are available for Windows 10 version 1803, version 1709 and earlier unsupported Windows 10 versions. You can download all of these Media Feature Packs from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3145500/media-feature-pack-list-for-windows-n-editions.
Hey,
This is exactly what helped. My browser flashed the message briefly on one video after installing this, but now the videos work!
Thank you for plain english.
Most sites ‘help’ steps include disabling a plugin that is not there and installing some bs software which doesn’t help at all.
Thanks!