Nowadays, almost every website comes with embedded videos. While every normal browser can play practically all sorts of videos, it may sometimes fail and show you this error message – “The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported” on your screen. Sometimes, this is just a server-side fault and you can fix it just by refreshing the browser. Other times, an Ad blocker on a particular website can also cause this issue.
Workarounds –
1. You should just refresh the webpage. Generally, refreshing the webpage reloads all the components, including the video ones.
2. Try opening the same webpage on another browser and try to play the same video again. Check if this is working.
3. Restart your router. Some users have mentioned this neat trick in various forums.
Fix 1 – Pause the ad blocker extension
Some ad blockers don’t only block ads, they block trackers, and HTML scripts also. In this process, the video on a website can be blocked.
1. On Google Chrome, check the top-right corner of your screen.
2. Check whether you can see any ad blocker extension is present there or not.
3. If you can see any such extension, click on it.
4. Tap “Once” to pause that extension.
This pauses the ad blocker extension on the browser and reloads the page. If the webpage is not reloaded automatically, you can refresh it manually.
Now, Refresh the page again and try to play the video and check whether the error message is re-appearing or not.
Fix 2 – Try an incognito tab
Incognito tabs avoid any interference from any installed extensions and other components.
1. Open Google Chrome.
2. You can either press the Ctrl+Shift+N keys together* or you can just click on the three-dot menu and tap “New Incognito tab” to open a new incognito tab in the browser.
Once you have opened the incognito tab, load the website and launch the video once again.
Test if this is working. If this is working and the video is playing normally, some extension is causing the trouble.
[*NOTE – This shortcut holds true for most browsers except in Mozilla Firefox (as it is based on the Quantum engine. So, in there, the shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+P. ]
Fix 3 – Remove the extensions
Some third-party extensions can break the website, blocking the video completely. So, try to remove the extension from the browser and test.
1. If you look carefully at the Google Chrome page, you can see the three-dot menu in the right corner.
2. Just, tap it and tap “More tools>“.
3. Then, click on “Extensions” to explore the complete list of extensions.
4. On the Extensions page, look for any ad-blocking extension, such as AdBlock, uBlock, etc.
5. Tap “Remove” to remove the extension from the browser.
After removing the extension, open the website again and test.
Fix 4 – Update the browser
Check whether Chrome is missing an important update and if it is, update the browser.
1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Then, click on the three-dot menu and click “About” in the menu options.
3. Next, click the “About Google Chrome” option in the context menu.
4. Now, you can see the current version of Google Chrome.
5. It will automatically look for the latest version of Chrome and download-install it on your computer.
You can also track the progress.
6. Once the browser is updated, you’ll see this message “Nearly up to date! Relaunch Chrome to finish updating.”
7. Tap “Relaunch” to relaunch the browser and finish the process.
Once you have updated it, load up the website once again. Check whether you are able to play the video.
Fix 5 – Just wait it out
If you can’t play the video at all, just wait till the server is up again. There is nothing you can do if this is a server-side issue. So, keep trying to reach the website at regular intervals. Usually, these issues are fixed quickly and the website should start working within a few hours.