Have Twitter videos suddenly stopped playing on your laptop? I feel your pain: I had exactly the same problem. All of a sudden, Chrome just stopped playing them: you’d press ‘play’ and the loading circle would spin for a second, and then stop with no video playback to be seen.
That, plus Chrome’s unquenchable hunger for memory (RAM), meant I followed many people’s advice and gave Microsoft Edge another go. I thoroughly recommend that, except I’ve just had the same thing happen, while I was trying to watch all the clips of Donald Trump’s eye opening interview with Axiom on Twitter.
After some research, I found two possible solutions.
How can I make Twitter play videos again?
My research found two possible solutions. The first one didn’t work for me, but it’s worth a go as it’s considerably less painful than the second one (which did!):
Clear your cookies for Twitter.com
Obviously you can delete all your cookies, but that’s very much ‘using a sledge hammer to crack a walnut’. Instead, delete them just for Twitter.
The solution for your browser may vary, but the easiest way to do it in Edge or Chrome is to click the padlock in the address bar next to the URL. From there, press “cookies” and then delete them all.
You’ll need to log in again, but hopefully videos will now play.
…only that didn’t work for me, so on to the nuclear option.
Turn off hardware acceleration for your browser
I have no idea why this worked, but it did. I really didn’t want to do this, because it’s a feature that’s designed to take the strain off your CPU by letting your computer’s GPU apply resources.
In Edge, go to Settings, then System and then untick “Use hardware acceleration when available.” In Chrome, it’s similar, but with one more step: you need to go to “advanced settings” before you see the “System” submenu.
That worked for me. Good luck!
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