In the last week, I noticed that about 10% of Youtube videos play without audio in all three browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome). For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic4PQ-tnwJw plays fine but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXhQNRsH3uc has no sound. I am not sure how to fix that. Vimeo plays music and sound effects but not voices (http://digg.com/video/the-history-of-aspect-ratio — I can’t hear any of the narration but music and SFX play just fine).
I re-installed Flash. Update: now it’s worse, and almost none of the videos have sound. Under IE, volume controls disappeared. In a lot of videos, music plays but voices either play extremely faintly (with volume at 100% in video controls, PC playback and on the speakers, I can barely hear them). Almost as if the playback depends on specific codec used by the video authors.
Stranger yet, known good tracks have functional instrumental music but the vocals are completely scrambled (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1qc_zg2od0)
Noticed the same thing. I literally have to load the page up via refresh while viewing that particular tab. If I click a YT link and fire up a new tab, that tabbed page is playing audio only. If I refresh the page, the video is shown as well. Weird.