For the past weeks, my videos have not been working. I have tried restarting my computer, shutting down Coursera, and more, but for some reason, the video won’t play. I am unsure of what to do and how to fix this. Is there anyone I can reach out to fix this? Thanks!
Are you sure that you also tried logging out of your Coursera account and then back in again? If it worked before, then did anything change in your Coursera account status? E.g. you were taking the course through a school and the semester is over or you had financial aid? If none of those things applies, then I’m afraid that the theory has to be that this is some kind of IT problem on your side. In that case, there’s nothing we can do to fix it. The only thing we can do is to suggest ways to diagnose the problem.
The first question is what do you mean by the videos not working? Do you get an error when you click the URL? Or does the video never show up at all when you click the URL (spinning wheel of death)? Or do you get the still picture of the video and hitting “play” gives an error? Or just hangs? Or …
What I mean by an “IT” problem is some software is blocking the access. At least if your symptom is that it just hangs when you try to access the URL. Meaning that it’s probably either A/V software or a firewall on your computer or some security software on your local area network. If you are at work, you might try asking your IT department for advice. If you’re at home or at school, then one thing to try would be to access the course website from a different computer on a different network. E.g. go to a public WiFi at a library or coffeehouse and see if that changes the behavior.
I tried to log in and out as well as log in with a public wifi. When I try to play the video a black screen appears. I will try to watch the videos from another device though. Thank you so much for the help!
I have this problem as well. I’m using Safari on an M1 MacBook Air.
My videos all start playing with a black/blank screen.
To get them to play, I have to use the Settings cog in the bottom right to change the video quality to any other setting to what it is currently on, e.g. 360p to 540p, then it works.
And then when I get to the next video I have to change it again from 540p to 360p to get it to play. The act of changing the resolution seems to iron out the bug, but it’s a bit annoying to have to do it every time. I’m surprised more people aren’t experiencing this, there’s nothing unusual about my PC setup and there must be a lot of people with M1 Macs.
Cheers
Andrew
FYI this has been happening for me with every course in the DL specialisation.
I use Chrome on several different MacBook Pros including an Intel one (vintage 2014) and one with an M1 Max chip. The videos work fine for me. I suggest you try Chrome or Firefox and see if it makes a difference.
Oh, interesting, I just tried using Safari and I see the same problem. So this is some kind of problem specific to Safari. You can check on the Coursera Help Center and see if they have any articles about this. Maybe you can find a way to fix this by adjusting your local Safari settings. If so, please let us know and we can add it to the FAQ Thread.
I can report this to the Course Staff, but I’m not sure what they will say. There’s a reductio ad absurdum here: how many browsers are there in the world? Do they have to test on all of them? If it works on Chrome and Firefox, then why is it their problem that Safari doesn’t work? So who knows when or if they provide a fix.
But in the meantime, there’s a pretty obvious workaround. 
Hi again, the videos are now working for me in Safari, no more blank screens.
Maybe the devs have tweaked something.
Thanks
Andrew
Thank you so much for the advice! Mine work as well now.