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I am building an Android education app in Kotlin where lessons are organized by course, grade, and chapter, and videos are played from YouTube.
To isolate the issue, I created a fresh minimal Android test app. There is no backend, no playlist logic, and I am testing with a single hardcoded video ID.
Setup
-
Android Studio
Kotlin
com.pierfrancescosoffritti.androidyoutubeplayer:core
Single hardcoded video ID
No backend involved
No playlist involved
What happens
The player initializes successfully, and onReady() fires, but both cueVideo(...) and loadVideo(...) fail.
On-screen YouTube error:152-4
Library callback: Player error: UNKNOWN
Relevant logs
A. onCreate entered 1. Activity started. Target Video ID: [rDo-GlvNsUc] (Raw: [rDo-GlvNsUc]) Internal WebView found and settings applied. B. initialize called C. initialize returned Activity onStart Activity onResume D. onReady fired Player width: 2020, height: 1080 E. calling cueVideo with [rDo-GlvNsUc] F. onError fired: [UNKNOWN] onVideoId: rDo-GlvNsUc F. onError fired: [UNKNOWN]Minimal code
youtubePlayerView.addYouTubePlayerListener(object : AbstractYouTubePlayerListener() { override fun onReady(youTubePlayer: YouTubePlayer) { Log.d("YT", "onReady fired") youTubePlayer.cueVideo("rDo-GlvNsUc", 0f) } override fun onError(youTubePlayer: YouTubePlayer, error: PlayerConstants.PlayerError) { Log.d("YT", "onError fired: [$error]") } })What I already ruled out
Backend or API issue
Bad video ID parsing
View size issue
Calling player methods before onReady()
Playlist parsing issue
Server or storage issue
Same failure happens in a fresh minimal app created from scratch
Question
What does YouTube error 152-4 mean in this Android embedded playback context?
Is this usually caused by:
The specific video having embedding disabled
YouTube restricting playback more aggressively in Android app or WebView embeds
This library no longer working reliably with current YouTube embed behavior
I am trying to determine whether this is a video-specific restriction, a YouTube-side change, or an Android WebView/library issue.
If you want, I can also give you an even more Stack Overflow-optimized version that sounds a little more technical and less likely to get nitpicked.
