Core YouTube embed thumbnail fails to render (releases.obsidian.md/youtube endpoint returns 404 for all video IDs)

Bug reports
,
1

Steps to reproduce

  1. Create a new note with the core embed syntax:
  2. Switch to Reading view (or Live Preview).
  3. The thumbnail/play-button widget never renders.
    Reproduces on:
  • The main vault (with community plugins enabled)
  • A brand-new, empty Sandbox vault with no plugins or CSS snippets
    Does NOT reproduce on:
  • Obsidian for Android, same note, same video — thumbnail displays correctly

Did you read and follow the Troubleshooting Guide ?

Yes — issue persists in Sandbox vault.

Expected result

The YouTube thumbnail with a play button overlay should render, as it used to before.

Actual result

An empty placeholder area is reserved at the correct thumbnail dimensions, but no thumbnail image is shown inside it, regardless of video ID or vault.

Environment

SYSTEM INFO（Sandbox vault）:
Obsidian version: 1.13.7
Installer version: 1.12.7
Operating system: Windows 11 Home 10.0.26200
Login status: not logged in
Language: ja
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: on
RECOMMENDATIONS:
none

Electron: 39.8.3
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265

Additional information

I spent significant time isolating this and can share the following findings:

  1. Network layer is confirmed healthy.
    Using Chromium’s NetLog capture (--log-net-log), I confirmed the thumbnail image request itself (https://img.youtube.com/vi/<id>/mqdefault.jpg) completes successfully with a full response and is written to disk cache. So the image is being fetched correctly — it’s simply never painted.

  2. Suspected root cause: releases.obsidian.md/youtube endpoint is broken
    releases.obsidian.md/youtube?v=<video_id> returns HTTP 404 for every video ID I tried. I confirmed this from two completely separate networks, and even with a definitely-valid, extremely well-known video ID (dQw4w9WgXcQ), so this is not specific to my network or a specific video.
    NetLog shows that this endpoint is called early in the embed flow, right before the request for the thumbnail image itself. My working theory: the core YouTube-embed widget calls this endpoint first (likely for metadata), and normally waits for a successful response before building the thumbnail DOM. Since this endpoint now always 404s, that step fails and the DOM is never built — even though, separately, the raw thumbnail image download still succeeds on its own.

  3. GPU rendering was ruled out.
    Regular remote image embeds (![](https://...jpg)) and local image embeds (![[image.png]]) both render correctly on the exact same machine/session, including with --disable-gpu --disable-gpu-sandbox --enable-unsafe-swiftshader --use-gl=swiftshader. So this is not a general compositing/GPU issue — it is isolated specifically to the YouTube embed widget’s code path.

  4. about a similar report
    A similar report from July 2025 ( <forum.obsidian.md/t/youtube-video-embed-does-not-work-video-player-configuration-error/103181> ) describes the same symptom (works in Sandbox test, was working before, stopped without any local config change) and self-resolved after ~2 days with no user-side action, consistent with a server-side dependency.

Happy to provide the full NetLog JSON or run further diagnostics if useful.

2

works fine for me.

The other thread that you linked was due to a change in youtube a year ago and we fixed it.

3

Thanks for checking!

I just re-tested and the thumbnail is still not rendering on my end (Obsidian 1.13.7, Windows 11, both main vault and a fresh Sandbox vault).

I also re-checked the releases.obsidian.md/youtube endpoint directly just now, and it’s still returning a 404 for me — including for the well-known video ID dQw4w9WgXcQ that I mentioned before.

> GET /youtube?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ HTTP/1.1
> Host: releases.obsidian.md
> User-Agent: curl/8.21.0
> Accept: */*
>
* Request completely sent off
< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
< Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:55:56 GMT
< Content-Length: 0
< Connection: keep-alive
< Server: cloudflare
< cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC
< CF-RAY: a2f62792a93fdfc9-NRT

Since it “works fine” for you, would you mind checking whether releases.obsidian.md/youtube?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ itself returns 200 or 404 from your side? If it returns 200 for you but 404 for me, that would point to a regional/Cloudflare edge issue rather than something broken on my machine specifically — which would explain why it looks fine to you but not to me.

Happy to share the full NetLog capture if that helps narrow it down further.

4

As a side note, native <video> embeds (e.g. from other sites captured via Web Clipper) render their thumbnail just fine on the same machine — further confirming this is isolated to the core YouTube-embed widget’s dependency on the releases.obsidian.md endpoint, not a general media rendering issue.