YouTube's "sign in to confirm you're not a bot" IFRAME player fix

What happened?

Yesterday for the very first time, I encountered an issue with Zoom Player's YouTube playback based on the YouTube Javascript IFRAME player.

Trying to play a video resulted in a gray screen with a "sign in to confirm you're not a bot" message.

How do I sign in?

The only way to resolve this issue is to Sign in to YouTube, but how do you sign in from within Zoom Player?

Zoom Player's IFRAME player works through an integrated browser, Microsoft's WebView2 (based on the chromium project). As such, any browser cookies that store your login details are saved separately from any other browser you have installed.

So what can we do?

Enabling interactivity

The first thing is to enable YouTube interactivity in Zoom Player's advanced options which allows us to click elements within the YouTube playback window:

Once enabled, load a new YouTube video.

Opening a secondary browser window

Click on one of the "other videos" that appear while paused at the bottom of the screen (it appears even with the sign in message):

Clicking a video will open a new browser window outside of Zoom Player, but this new window still uses the same browser instance as Zoom Player and saves the login credentials cookie in the Zoom Player's WebView2 cache folder (managed by Microsoft).

Finally, sign in

Use the new window to to access YouTube's login page and sign in to your google account. Once signed it, it's recommend that you disable "YouTube interactivity" in the advanced options (see screenshot above).

After signing in, loading a new YouTube video should now work.

P.S.

Enabling YouTube interactivity will make controlling Zoom Player a bit more difficult, you may need to use the Alt+"F4" keyboard shortcut to close Zoom Player (and later re-open) since keyboard/mouse controls may be captured by the YouTube window as long as a YouTube video is playing.