Trailers

Turn trailers on or off over the art on Explore and title pages, and fix trailers that do not play.

Turn trailers on or off

1. Open Settings > Appearance.
2. In the For everyone card, switch Play trailers by themselves.

It is on by default and applies to everyone. Off means nothing plays by itself and HolyArrs stops looking trailers up.

Trailers never play by themselves for Kid accounts, with Reduce motion on (hover growth and slow zoom stop too), on 2G or 3G connections, or when the browser asks to save data.

Where trailers play

Place	When
Explore hero	After 1.5 s in view. The hero also zooms through up to 4 backdrops
Poster cards	0.8 s after the pointer rests on a card, or on keyboard focus. Esc closes
Artist pages	One official music video, the same way

One video plays at a time, muted. The sound button at the bottom right turns sound on until you close the browser. If the browser blocks sound without a recent click, it stays muted.

If it does not work

Symptom: nothing plays anywhere. Fix: check Play trailers by themselves is on, the account is not a Kid account and Reduce motion is off. Then check Health for a trailer warning.

Symptom: one trailer never plays. Cause: the video needs a sign-in or age check, is removed, private, blocked in your country, an unstarted premiere or behind a content warning. HolyArrs does not get around these. Fix: none needed. HolyArrs skips the video for 7 days and tries up to 4 more trailers for the title. Blocked videos and premieres are retried within the hour. With none left, the moving backdrop shows.

Symptom: the full-screen player says it can’t play. Cause: it shows the reason when known, for example that YouTube plays it only for signed-in adults.

Symptom: trailers stopped after working. Fix: open Health. If it says YouTube changed how its videos are reached, update HolyArrs.

For experts

Where a trailer comes from

1. The metadata server lists the title’s YouTube trailers: official trailer first, then teaser, your language before English. Clips never play.
2. HolyArrs reads the video’s direct address from YouTube. It downloads nothing and never signs in.
3. Your browser plays that address. When it cannot, or needs it for sound, HolyArrs passes the stream through without storing it.
4. If that fails, the privacy-enhanced YouTube embed plays, then the moving backdrops.

Lookup schedule

Item	Value
First round after start	about 3 min
Round interval	5 min
Lookups per round	20, about 2 s apart
Retry for a title with no playable trailer	2 h
Artist page kept ready	1 week after anyone last looked

Order in a round: addresses about to expire, then titles people opened that had nothing, then the rest of Explore for each non-Kid account. Lookups never run when you open a page. The one exception is pressing play in an artist’s Music videos row. On a new setup the first full pass can take a few hours; until a round reaches a title, the embed plays instead.

Music videos start at the most replayed moment, ignoring the opening. If the picture barely moves there, a nearby moving moment is used. A video behind a sign-in or age check starts 30% in.

Health warnings

Status > Updates and Health show the last good lookup. After YouTube turns away 5 different titles in a row, Health warns with a reason. The count survives restarts. With trailers off, Health leaves this out. Age-checked, sign-in or content-warning videos do not count.

Reason	Meaning
YouTube asks to confirm you’re not a bot	YouTube is checking this server
YouTube changed how its videos are reached	A HolyArrs update fixes it
YouTube turned the lookups away	YouTube answered with an error
YouTube could not be reached	No connection
Trailers are not being found	Trailers that played stopped. An update may be needed

Privacy

• Lookups go from your server to YouTube. The browser loads video from YouTube’s servers, so YouTube sees the viewer’s address.
• The embed uses youtube-nocookie.com.
• HolyArrs sends no names, requests or Library data to YouTube, and keeps only the video address.

Related

• Explore
• Health checks