If you have videos in Google Drive that won’t play, I will show you a fix that I’ve used on Google Chrome as a workaround. This fix seems to work well for a lot of situations, but perhaps not everyone.
Fix Google Drive Videos that Won’t Play
Very frustrated with the fact that my Google Drive videos weren’t playing or streaming, but instead showing a black screen, I contacted Google customer support. I explained to them that neither clicking on the big red play button or the small white play button in the bottom left corner did anything. They told me to clear my browser history and cookies, but were not ultimately able to help me.
After realizing that I could successfully play the unplayable video in another web browser (like Firefox or Safari), I found a solution that involves signing in as another Chrome user.
In case you’re not familiar, when you first install Chrome, it asks you to sign in with your Google account. Chrome gives you the ability to sign in to multiple Google accounts.
The first thing you want to do is create a new Google Chrome account. Click on your personalized circle icon in the upper right corner of Google Chrome then Add.
Proceed to sign in to the Google account where you’re having trouble playing the videos in Drive. In the new window that opens, go to Google Drive, and try to play the video. In my experience, the video played without any problem in the new window.
What I ended up doing was removing the old Google Chrome user from the browser and started to use the new Google Chrome user.
