Specifically Youtube videos not playing as of yesterday

Help!
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1

Hi, so I was doing world dev yesterday, youtube videos were working without issues. I come back an hour later, to hang out in some venues to discover youtube videos specifically no longer work for me. VRCDN and Twitch work fine. I went as far as reformatting my PC entirely thinking that would help. It did not. Here is what I show from the log.

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2025.03.06 13:41:05 Warning - [Video Playback] ERROR: [youtube] by7T05cUTwU: Sign in to confirm you re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See FAQ · yt-dlp/yt-dlp Wiki · GitHub for how to manually pass cookies. Also see Extractors · yt-dlp/yt-dlp Wiki · GitHub for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies
2025.03.06 13:41:05 Debug - [Video Playback] URL ‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by7T05cUTwU’ resolved to ‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by7T05cUTwU’
2025.03.06 13:41:05 Debug - [AVProVideo] Opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by7T05cUTwU (offset 0) with API MediaFoundation
2025.03.06 13:41:07 Error - [AVProVideo] Error: Loading failed. File not found, codec not supported, video resolution too high or insufficient system resources.

Also I noticed this but may not be related.
2025.03.06 13:41:03 Debug - [AVProVideo] Initialising AVPro Video v2.8.5 (native plugin v2.8.5f1-ultra) on AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT/Direct3D 11.0 [level 11.1] (MT False) on WindowsPlayer
2025.03.06 13:41:03 Error - [AVProVideo] No MediaReference specified
2025.03.06 13:41:03 Error - [AVProVideo] No file path specified
2025.03.06 13:41:03 Error - [AVProVideo] No MediaReference specified
2025.03.06 13:41:03 Error - [AVProVideo] No file path specified

Youtube works fine in the browser, so i’m not sure what the problem is seeing as I have a fresh copy of windows now and fully up to date drivers.

Any help appreciated!
Thanks,
-Gutter

2

The second part where AVPro starts and says it isn’t given a video to play is not a problem.

The bot error is new, in the browser are you logged in to a google account? Stuff like yt-dlp acts differently from a browser, particularly with cookies and also fingerprinting. Your web browser acts perfectly like a web browser for obvious reasons, but software like yt-dlp doesn’t act perfectly, or it’ll act like older stuff

3

Thanks so much for the quick reply! Yes, I am logged into youtube with my google account. Let me know if I can get you anything else. I did also notice now that while twitch plays smoothly, its got artifacting. I tried multiple channels to test.

Only hunch I have, is I was opening 2 vrchat instances testing my udon networking which played a youtube video MANY times while I made changes and reloaded. Could it be youtube detecting it as like… hammering abuse and just cut me off? I would think not because it still works in browser. So its seemingly not IP related. No idea why this started.

4

Honestly that would be my guess.

You can easily be signed in on browser. Not sure if you can be signed in on VRChats yt-dlp, also I wouldn’t want to risk my Google account lol, I like having a Gmail account.

But yeah, YouTube can easily tell the difference between your logged in browser and other things.

5

Yea, super unfortunate. I think they have blacklisted my current machine from using yt-dlp without authenticating. VRChat uses a special version of yt-dlp that doesnt even contain the command line switches for logging in. I tried using tthe newest one from github that has the “get cookies from browser” function and it worked. So I can no longer anonymously use yt-dlp it seems. :loudly_crying_face: My best hope is that its just a cooldown situation. If I permanently cant watch youtube videos in vrchat that would be so lame. As a DJ that makes venues, I use this functionality a lot. Thanks for the help though.