I think it is most likely Youtube’s end as well. They’re trying to suck every penny of ad revenue from every site and I’m sure VRC was something they thought was a considerable leak. Same with Discord. Whether that’s true or not isn’t something I know, but it is what it is.
Are you intending to share it and/or make it available in one form or another? From your description however it sounds like “every user” has to install your app. What do you think the odds of that happening are?
It is a common sentiment but you can easily see how sucking ad revenue isn’t a major part of the problem. How? I’m playing YT videos in my world now as are many, many others. There are no ads, there are no glitches.
There are no problems at the moment with native Quest and PCVR works when one enters a URL into the URL input field. What didn’t work were redirects and from what I was able to deduce that is all that changed.
So if greed or ad revenue is driving the change it isn’t working.
Apologies, I did post the GitHub link to it before but the mods flagged it as spam/advertising since the posts were so similar (which is obvious since there’s 15 different topics all about this same error lol.) Updated my previous post.
There isn’t anything to install, you just throw a shortcut to it in VRCX’s auto launch folder and it does everything on its own. :>
Thanks. As for “install” even copying a file is a form of installation. My point is that someone visiting VRC would need to stop playing, download the file and place it (trusting you) on their PC.
It is definitely an alternative for those people having issues. It remains to see how many people go through the effort.
And if someone who is having issues has tried out this solution perhaps they would be so kind as to let us know if it solved the problem.
Hello everyone, I too am having this issue, but where as everyone else in the room can see the video, I unfortunately get the same errors as you guys. I have tried a lot of the techniques and so far nothing has worked, sometimes i reset router and it’ll work but lately that’s not the case. I do hope that anyone having this issue can find a good, permanent solution to it.
It may not be obvious but “having this issue” isn’t really a thing. Which issue? Which world(s), which video player? Are the other players in the the same country? Are they all using Android and you’re not or vice versa?
The likelihood of this being related to your router seems very low considering all the other things that can affect video streaming. It is even possible that you don’t have allow untrusted URLs enabled.
Everyone I’ve met in VRC recently can watch videos with one exception. YT implements region restrictions which is why you may need to know what country people are in if you want to determine the cause. You can also upload a test video to YT which you do not restrict in any way.
Sometimes a particular world will not play videos but that could be an implementation problem unrelated to YT or VRC.
As best you can try to document things. World name, video player used, video(s) you tried, if players were on Android or PC. Using Quest, Pico or some other brand headset. Write things down and post them here.
Hello everyone, had the same trouble as for several month now and still didnt find the solution
Tried everything from cache, changing DPI spoofer/VPN, turning it all off to swapping yt-dlp.exe file and yet to see positive results. Only intresting thing that i have this trouble on most of the worlds (AVPro/Unity players i suppose and their forks), but on some particular world it works like a charm.
Anyone got some ideas on the fix?
P.S. : did remember that films on Popcorn Place are working for me just fine aswell, so i suppose its something about youtube itself
P.S. 2 : YTS world apperently loads about 2 videos from “trending” (maybe since they are preloaded/have different link idk) and then stops working at all
And log messeges:
- [DEBUG]USharpVideoQueue: Queued Data Critical Function Event with content ‘call:_OnUSharpVideoQueueFinalVideoEnded:-1694982664’
- [DEBUG]USharpVideoQueue: Disregarded DataCritical event _OnUSharpVideoQueueSkippedError, because timestamp ‘-1695781756’
occured before most recent event '-1695124683
I just randomly started having this issue too. Everyone else seems to be using them just fine but i’m unable to use any video player in the entire game. It’s just a white screen and no videos will load.
TL;DR at the bottom - otherwise, context below
Just had this same problem, managed to fix it on my end (using a Windows machine over Wi-Fi exclusively, not sure how applicable this could be for others, but might be something similar)
The only troubleshooting steps I took before this was just to clear all the cache types in VRC from the menu in-game, and restarting the game - nothing else
Since it seems like VRChat looks at your network when loading videos for one reason or another (probably to detect misuse of some kind), resetting the network catalog worked for me
netsh winsock reset is the command - Microsoft Learn has a page on winsockif you’d like more details
Short version (from what I can tell from this and other websites): removes all the Layered Service Providers (LSPs) to give the catalog a fresh start, and LSPs should be reinstalled as needed as far as I’m aware - please note: this can break functionality in some programs so you may need to reconfigure them - please proceed with caution, don’t indiscriminately run commands (haven’t had problems myself just yet, but don’t take just my word for it)
I just ran it in Command Prompt as an administrator and restarted my PC, video players started working for me again! Albeit, not every video I tried worked, but the majority of them did, which when nothing worked before, is a success for me
Although this is when I have put in the link myself - I have yet to see if this works when others have put in links
TL;DR: Ran netsh winsock reset in the Command Prompt as administrator, then restarted my PC - most videos seemed to work after that when none did before
Might not work for everyone but could be useful - and please double check to make sure it won’t impact you in any other undesired ways
A year and a half ago the fix for me ended up being to make a new Windows user. The issue has now come back to haunt me, but this time in this fashion. Previously it simply didn’t work period, so…
Aright well I was gonna make a whole new thread for this but since this one is still somewhat active I’ll just post it here.
The latest round of Youtube player issues is entirely due to Youtube itself. There’s been a lot of in-depth discussion in the yt-dlp github repo about it, and it essentially comes down to (overly simplifying here) YouTube requiring browsers to process some Javascript nonsense before it will provide the actual video stream. If you use a non-Chrome browser that still allows UBlockOrigin to work, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the BS little “Having trouble? Find out why!” popup that appears whenever you go to watch anything (which then tells you to disable adblocking). The YT-in-VRC issue is similar; older versions of yt-dlp are unable to ‘correctly’ process the initial response(s) from Youtube, and as such, Youtube just spits back an error message/404/empty response.
(Brief aside: I’m calling out the video player prefab makers, as a software engineer of 20+ years: Please do better with your debug logging. A program shouldn’t give 8 potential reasons for an error at that log level (or no reason at all, like some players do).)
Anyway. While previous solutions of using the yt-dlp nightly build did work, it has slowly but surely become less reliable as Youtube has continued to make life more difficult for “Reasons”, and as of this past week (11th Nov 2025), the dev team have made the choice to require some form of Javascript runtime to be available to the yt-dlp executable at runtime so that it can correctly process the responses from Youtube. The program will still run without one (for now), but it will emit a warning if it can’t find one, and the devs will no longer be providing support for any bugs/issues/etc if the user reporting said issue doesn’t have one installed.
Obviously VRC staff cannot recommend doing any of this, because of all those fun things like ‘potential liability if they suggest something that borks your computer’ and ‘licensing conflicts of including precompiled binaries of open-source projects’ (and possibly even opening themselves up to legal shenanigans from Goog/YT/Alphabet if they decide to pull the ‘bypassing access control mechanisms’ card).
If you do anything mentioned below, keep in mind that you do so at your own risk, and neither I nor VRChat can be held responsible if you download something that breaks your PC.
Having said that, though, if one were to download the yt-dlp nightly build, along with a Javascript runtime (the yt-dlp devs recommend ‘Deno’; the latter offers a nice single precompiled binary), and place those into the VRC Tools directory, there is a very high probability that YouTube videos will work for you in-game. Keep in mind that VRC appears to re-download their version of yt-dlp every time you load a world with a video player in it, so either setting the yt-dlp binary read-only, or copying it back in after loading the world is necessary.
(Aside: I’m not entirely certain if the same solution will work under Linux; I’ve got VRC running very nicely in Cachy with Proton and WiVRn, but still spend most of my playtime in Windows because Substance Painter refuses to run in Wine (sadface).)
So there you have it. Unfortunately, VRChat has about as much power over what YouTube decides to do in their pursuit of (ad revenue/user data collection/anti-adblocking/etc) as, well, any of us do. I don’t know what sorts of customization VRC does with the yt-dlp binary (and I suspect if I asked they wouldn’t/couldn’t tell me anyway), but at least at this point, it’s not as simple as them just updating the version they distribute to end users. (Though if I may be a snarky little b*tch for a moment, I’d have preferred they spend more cycles on this than ‘boops’, but whatever.)
I dont know if this has any connection to the above but Videos have stopped working on my side a couple of months ago and the only way to get them to work is to use VPN.
I have tried multiple browsers and devices with the same issue. no vpn no videos.
I have been in contact with VRchat and have been asked to follow their online guidelines on DNS and connection settings which makes no difference.Have not received a clear definitve answer as to why this is happening and im stuck with paying for vpn just to be able to watch youtube video clips with friends,
does anyone here understand why it only works with vpn?
If it’s working with a VPN without any fussing around with yt-dlp, I can only assume your VPN endpoint is in a country where Youtube either hasn’t (yet) or isn’t allowed to implement the asinine access controls they have in the US.
If you feel like experimenting, try choosing endpoints in different regions and see if some work and others don’t.
They won’t do nothing. I already tried to talk to them and they said suck it up and oh well, not their problem.