ajayyy
Rendering Thumbnails fails
When trying to replace thumbnails, rendering problems pile up and up. In some cases it is helpful to clear browser cache and delete data and try again. But for some channels it it totally not possible to solve the problem this way.
edit: Here is an example video if this should help. This is also one of the channels where changing thumbnails almost always fails with the mentioned error message. Tested also on brave browser in a seperate profile without any extensions except DeArrow :
Debug information:
{ "debug": { "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "platform": "Win32", "language": "de-DE", "extensionVersion": "2.0.2" }, "config": { "activated": true, "allowExpirements": true, "alreadyActivated": true, "casualMode": true, "confirmGuidelinesCount": 4, "darkMode": true, "extensionEnabled": true, "firefoxOldContentScriptRegistration": false, "firstThumbnailSubmitted": true, "freeAccessWaitingPeriod": 43200000, "freeTrialDuration": 21600000, "importedConfig": true, "lastGuidelinesConfirmation": 1740607450116, "lastIncognitoStatus": false, "showActivatedMessage": true, "showDonationLink": true, "showInfoAboutCasualMode": false, "showInfoAboutRandomThumbnails": false, "showUpsells": true, "thumbnailReplacements": 42115, "titleReplacements": 4470, "vip": false, "actAsVip": true, "donateClicked": 0, "invidiousInstances": 0, "keepUnsubmitted": true, "keepUnsubmittedInPrivate": false, "thumbnailSaturationLevel": 100, "titleFormatting": -1, "onlyFormatCustomTitles": false, "shouldCleanEmojis": true, "onlyTitleCaseInEnglish": false, "serverAddress": "Default server address", "thumbnailServerAddress": "https://dearrow-thumb.ajay.app", "fetchTimeout": 7000, "startLocalRenderTimeout": 2000, "renderTimeout": 25000, "thumbnailCacheUse": 2, "showGuidelineHelp": true, "thumbnailFallback": 0, "thumbnailFallbackAutogenerated": 0, "showLiveCover": true, "defaultToCustom": true, "alwaysShowShowOriginalButton": false, "showOriginalOnHover": false, "showCustomOnHoverIfCasual": false, "replaceTitles": true, "replaceThumbnails": true, "useCrowdsourcedTitles": true, "titleMaxLines": 3, "casualModeSettings": { "funny": 1, "creative": 1, "clever": 1, "descriptive": 1, "other": 1 }, "showOriginalThumbWhenCasual": false, "onlyShowCasualIconForCustom": false, "channelOverrides": {}, "customConfigurations": {}, "showIconForFormattedTitles": true, "countReplacements": true, "ignoreAbThumbnails": true, "ignoreTranslatedTitles": false, "hideDetailsWhileFetching": true, "openMenuKey": { "key": "d", "shift": true }, "enableExtensionKey": { "key": "e", "ctrl": true, "shift": true, "alt": true } } }
I'm not sure whether another ticket is necessary for this. I have made another observation in this context:
Since in freetube for android (with DeArrow activated) only the failed videos suddenly show the original thumbnails instead of any video frame, I suspect a connection between them. I don't have that problem in any other application (neither in YouTube itself nor in Smattube or Freetube for Windows), yet there seems to be an effect directly related to the rendering errors described. So a render error seems to create an entry somewhere.
I tried to downvote the respective original so that the information (original thumbnail is too clibaity, for example) is also passed on to the various apps. However, this does not work, because downvoting originals ends up with an error in more than 90% of cases: “Internal Server Error”. This has no effect in freetube for Android, where the original thumbnail is still incorrectly included.
According to #313, downvoting should work in principle, if I have understood correctly.
In my experience, however, it does nevertheless look like a bug .
It might be a video that is region-locked and not available in the thumbnail generation server's country.
The browser extension falls back to YouTube's own autogenerated thumbnails in that cause to avoid showing original thumbnails. So that could be a feature you could suggest FreeTube do.
Thank you for that info. As far as freetube is concerned, I'll ask there. The problem affects a wide range of videos that are not only located in Germany, where I use YouTube.
As for the many render errors in general, it doesn't look like region locks to me. Most of the videos I try to correct fail in the meantime. In very, very rare cases, a resubmission date works lateron, which would argue against a regional lock.
Looks like the thumbnail generator has been getting blocked a lot today (google bot detection), so maybe that's related
In my case I can only see thumbnails if DeArrow is turned off in my add-ons manager (and I then refresh YouTube).
