How To Force YouTube To Use Flash Instead Of HTML5

I had a weird issue with this video yesterday.

It refused to play.

No matter how much I refreshed or reloaded the page, or cleared the cache, or typed in the URL anew, or waited... it just wouldn't play. Not at all. It looked like it was about to play, but all it showed was a black screen and no progress.

I did some research, assuming it might be a quirk with YT's HTML5 version of the video player, and found out that you can force YouTube to play a video with Flash by appending &nohtml5=1 or &nohtml5=True to the URL. That's all. Short or long URL - both work fine.

Why the error occurred is still a mystery however. It's possible it wasn't the player at fault at all - just a local caching issue, but if you ever run into an error where even a hard refresh doesn't work - maybe this will! Hope it may come in handy, fellow stranger surfing the Web in search for solutions to our most mundane modern day problems. ;)

And in retrospect, I should've probably titled this post: How To Fix An Impossible YouTube Playback Error or What To Do When YouTube Videos Don't Start or Play Any YouTube Video With This Simple Trick. Hopefully alternate ideas in clear text dom't give any PR penalty...