Google Drive has become the default cloud storage option for a good number of users. The reason for this is not only due to the amount of space that the platform offers totally free, but also to the integration with the rest of Google applications. Playing a video within the app, for example, is made possible by the YouTube API support. Unfortunately, the platform's video playback doesn't always work as it should. Some users claim that the videos do not play on Google Drive, "They get paused with a yellow triangle and playback doesn't work." Now we can know the reason for this problem thanks to the Google support forum, whose moderators have described the origin in a message to one of the affected users.
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I can't play Google Drive videos, this is why
"There was a problem with the playback of this video", "The file could not be previewed" ... More than 600 users have reported in the last few months having had some kind of problem with the video playback of Google Drive. In a query carried out on October 17, 2019, the company disclosed the origin of this problem through a message published by one of the platform's experts.
Playback issues appear to be due to a format incompatibility with the Google Drive Video API . As specified in the original message, the platform supports a fairly limited list of video formats. Specifically, the list of video formats supported by Google Drive is as follows:
- WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis audio codec).
- MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files (h264 and MPEG4 video codecs, and AAC audio codec).
- AVI (MJPEG video codec and PCM audio).
- MPEGPS (MPEG2 video and MP2 audio codec).
- WMV.
- FLV (Adobe: FLV1 video codec and MP3 audio).
- MTS.
Any file that does not correspond to any of these formats will not be played in the application. MOV, MKV, RM, RAM, ASF files ... The web will only show the following message:
- Whoops! There was a problem playing this video.
Google Drive doesn't play a video that it used to play
Many users have reported that Google Drive is unable to play videos that it previously managed to run within the application. The solution that some users have provided is based on opening the video in question from Google Drive and clicking on the three dots in the upper right corner. Then, we will click on the option Open in a new window , as we can see in the following screenshot:
Another option is to completely uninstall Google Chrome to reinstall it, or use an alternative web browser. Apparently, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox do not have any type of problem with the playback of videos in Drive, so we can use one of these browsers to play the videos without resorting to the solution described above. We can also use certain local players such as VLC, whose functions allow us to play any video from the Internet by copying the link of the file in question.
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