No matter what world im in, no matter what i use (youtube url or youtube search) since this new update, as a quest 2 player, nothing will load, please help, it wasnt like this before the update!
Hi, I have a deep understanding of the underlying issues so I can provide input. I’m not going to file any bug reports about this against VRChat (there’s already too many), because there’s generally nothing that can be done at the moment.
TL;DR: YouTube made changes and it’s likely going to be more challenging than usual for the community to continue supporting YouTube playback in VRChat now or in the future (plausibly without significant re-engineering efforts in the VRChat client), while VRChat compatible legacy playback formats are becoming gradually unavailable from YouTube.
Video players in Unity/VRChat are generally working, but your issue is with YouTube (and yt-dlp) and not with VRChat. It’s not just you, it affects all yt-dlp users in general, mpv video player software, anything that hooks into yt-dlp for remote video playback (including VRChat).
When you input a URL into a video player, VRChat calls a customized %LocalAppdata%Low\VRChat\VRChat\Tools\yt-dlp.exe (a VRChat modified yt-dlp 2026.07.04) to download and stream the video for you. The requirements for successful playback are:
- The URL is online/available to access for download.
- yt-dlp supports the service (e.g. YouTube) or it’s a generic URL.
- It’s one of the common formats with audio+video in the same stream for VRChat video players to support it. (Individual audio only/video only formats are not supported in VRChat generally.)
Behind the scenes it looks similar to this picture:
yt-dlp fetches the YouTube web page, lists available video/audio formats from the android_vr extractor, and then VRChat picks the only compatible format 18 (360p video with low quality audio) for playback.
See the last part from the screenshot where I attempt to redownload the same video? It says ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden. That’s an intermittent error from YouTube, specific to the android_vr extractor. In VRChat, you would see this as a generic video error or “Failed to load video” message on video players. The upstream issue is linked below.
The solution from the upstream yt-dlp project to download YouTube videos has been to remove android_vr from the default list of clients, and use the new visionos extractor client in yt-dlp nightly. The issue is visionos does not have any compatible legacy formats (audio+video in the same format) for VRChat. This leaves VRChat with no remaining compatible extractors for YouTube playback for the foreseeable future.
This started in July 2026 with YouTube killing off the web_safari client, which formerly provided 1080p videos without login and PO tokens for YouTube playback in VRChat. You may not have noticed it being gone, because android_vr was available as a fallback for 360p video playback in VRChat.
There’s a long list of issues previously worked around with YouTube playback in yt-dlp and VRChat. I’ve tried to keep most of the current and previous issues documented in the comments on VRChat Feedback:
The problem now becomes that VRChat cannot generally “just update yt-dlp” to make playback work again with YouTube URLs when a new stable release of yt-dlp becomes available.
In the future, for YouTube playback to become available with the current methods, this is going to require SABR support in yt-dlp (unavailable/unimplemented in general, experimental in a separate branch) in addition to support in VRChat video players to play separate audio & video streams (merging video formats).
Okay, looks like the upstream yt-dlp project is going to use the web_embedded client as a fallback for the legacy format 18, which is compatible with VRChat.
I’m now waiting for a new stable yt-dlp release, before I submit a new feature request to VRChat Feedback to update yt-dlp so you can enjoy 360p YouTube videos for a little while longer (maybe).
I have to emphasize and echo bashonly from the yt-dlp project that these legacy formats “were always expected to be sunset eventually”.
How long would that take?
It’s anyone’s best guess when yt-dlp releases a new stable version. It could be days or weeks.
After that, it’s been historically around 1-14 days for VRChat to update after making a feature request to update.
The android extractor will also be usable in VRChat for YouTube for format 18 only, but it’s not default in the current yt-dlp 2026.07.04 and also not in the list of default clients in yt-dlp nightly. This would require VRChat to make changes to include it for fallback in their fork of yt-dlp, if web_embedded will break.
yt-dlp released 2026.08.19, so I’ve made the feature request to update yt-dlp in VRChat which will fix this YouTube playback issue in VRChat.