I’ve added some YouTube videos to a page. When I preview them in the browser, they all say, “Video Unavailable - Watch on YouTube”. The Watch on YouTube is a link to the video on YouTube.
Is this normal behavior? Is it because it’s not uploaded to a server?
Hmmm, that should work locally in preview. Can you share the URL to a few of the YouTube videos so we can test it here?
Okay, I did some testing. If I embed the YouTube iframe code in an HTML component, it behaves the same in Preview. I also put a personal mp4 file and it worked fine.
So, I created a new project with just a home page with a menu and one video component with a link to the YouTube video. It behaved the same way in Preview stating Video Unavailable. I then upload the new project to a test website and the video plays without a problem. So this is no longer an obstacle.
So it appears to be something in how it is setup in the Elements preview that is causing this. It would be nice for it to work in preview, but not a game changer.
Hi @ercross,
Great to hear the video is at least working on your published site!
I’ve been digging into this a bit more this morning, and I suspect the issue might be due to YouTube embed restrictions. It’s possible that the video has been configured to only allow playback on specific domains.
I could be wrong, but what points me in this direction is that even the official embed code from YouTube doesn’t work when tested locally. That typically suggests the video owner has enabled domain-level restrictions on embedding.
Let me know if you’re able to test with a different video as that could help confirm the theory 
Hi Ben,
I posted a short video to YouTube of some deer in my back yard. I added it to my video page and opened it in preview. It plays fine.
So, you must be right. It must have something to do with the settings on that particular video. I just think it’s kind of weird that all the others work when they are put on the server, just not in preview.
OK, great! At least we are narrowing down the issue.
Are you the owner of that video? If so, could you check the embed settings? I’m pretty certain now that it’s being blocked on “local” servers.
Hi Ben,
I own the deer video that I posted which is working fine in preview. I didn’t see anywhere in the settings on YouTube where I could block it on local servers.
The other videos that are not working in preview, I do not own.
Then unfortunately you’ll have to just accept that the owner of those videos doesn’t want them displayed on certain domains — there’s not much you can do about that, other than contacting them and asking nicely to change the embed settings 
Hi Ben,
I just created a separate html file with my deer video and one of the ones that wouldn’t preview. Opened in Safari and my deer video played, but the other clearly is being blocked. So it’s totally not Elements. Thanks for help in narrowing this down. Your support has been fantastic.