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YouTube is glitching out — what to do if you're stuck with NaN:NaN on your timeline
- Affected accounts can’t manually advance video playback.
- Logging out or using incognito mode offers a temporary fix.
- The root cause may be tied to experimental YouTube flags.
YouTube long ago evolved to become so much more than a place for entertainment, and whether you use it to get your news, discover fresh recipes, or learn how to complete projects around the house, it’s an invaluable repository for millions of users. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you rely on something until you lose it, though, and that’s exactly what we’re thinking about today as some YouTube viewers find themselves confronted with a confusing bug that prevents them from skipping ahead in videos.
Affected users have been sharing their woes over on Reddit, with an experience just like the one StormerJack describes: you go to advance your video by clicking on the timeline, and instead of jumping ahead, the player rewinds all the way back to the start. When mousing over the timeline, instead of seeing the actual position in the video, you’ll get a bizarre “-NaN:NaN” label.
Early observations noted that the problem behavior seems tied to particular accounts, and logging out, or going incognito, temporary resolves it. But if you log back in to the affected account, that -NaN:NaN business comes back.
Maybe the most promising advice we’ve seen so far comes from Miidoriin, who suggests that setting up these lines in your uBlock Origin config will get YouTube working normally again:
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.enable_gameplay, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.enable_playables_deeplink, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.kevlar_disable_preemptive_player_reset, false)Of course, we’re not going to recommend you try using such software to block YouTube ads, but a targeted approach of stopping these particular flags from full-on breaking YouTube playback seems plenty reasonable.
The nature of that fix sure seems to cast blame on new functionality YouTube is trying out — and something locked behind a series of flags like this would very much explain why the behavior is tied to particular accounts. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and to see if we can learn anything more specific about the cause of this glitch — and ideally, find a more graceful way to resolve it. We’ll be sure to update this post with any information we learn.