Just in the last few days,  I'll be watching YouTube videos and the first few play normally, then when I try to open another, I get a black, grainy screen with an error message saying "playback error"... From that point on, I get the same on every video I try to open.  If I close YouTube and wait a while, it seems to go away for a few videos, then does it again.  

Puzzling.

It seems to be a well known error (>20 million hits on Google "youtube playback error").

Looks like Mac's, iPhone are showing the problem more often but not only these.

 

What device do you use?

What version of operating system?

What browser or viewer (app?) do you use?

 

More details might help to come closer.

 

Could be a problem of the Memory Management for both System and Graphic Card (Resources). 

 

Could also be a problem of the Graphic Driver.

17 hours ago, KhunBENQ said:

It seems to be a well known error (>20 million hits on Google "youtube playback error").

Looks like Mac's, iPhone are showing the problem more often but not only these.

 

What device do you use?

What version of operating system?

What browser or viewer (app?) do you use?

 

More details might help to come closer.

 

Using a 6 year old HP "Sleekbook" laptop, 8gb ram but a low level AMD processor, running Win. 8.1 and Chrome.  I think  ArnonK may be right suspecting the graphics card as it's a cheapo shared memory type and may just be slowing down with age,  I have a new laptop (Chinese Jumper EZ Book, 6gb ram, Win 10) running off the same wifi and it's not having the same problem so it looks  the problem is in my older laptop. 

Am I correct in assuming that if a graphics card is shared memory, then it is probably built into the mother board and not easy to replace?

If the MB has built-in graphics, you can still buy a separate graphics card for the PCI slot and use that.

However, before you do that, I would try updating your flash if it's not up-to-date and see if that makes any difference.