again, the video players are NOT working! how fun.
UviDawg
hi again, the advice i got from someone last time did not work, to nobody's surprise, until a few days ago when my video players started randomly playing again! awesome!
and about 25 minutes ago, someone in an instance played a very LOUD video, so i force stopped it with the little square stop button, and since then, the ERRORS ARE BACK YAAAAY I LOVE NOT HAVING VIDEOS AGAIN!!!!!
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WubTheCaptain
I've submitted a feature request there to possibly avoid this in the future: Update yt-dlp to 2026.02.04 to resolve YouTube playback issues
I suspect VRChat's older yt-dlp 2026.01.29 may be failing to solve YouTube's n/sig challenges correctly and therefore some users may be getting flagged as bots. yt-dlp 2026.02.04 changes the default JS video player to
tv
for n/sig deciphering.WubTheCaptain
> 2026.02.05 23:27:59 Warning - [Video Playback] ERROR: [youtube] 1oDrJba2PSs: Sign in to confirm you're not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cookies-to-yt-dlp for how to manually pass cookies. Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-youtube-cookies for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies
This is an isolated issue and not an actionable bug report.
Your IP-address has been blocked by YouTube while you are logged out. Personally I think there's nothing VRChat or the upstream yt-dlp can do to fix this.
UviDawg
WubTheCaptain how do i fix this? i have no idea how to code where these are asking me to. why would this even happen in the first place?
WubTheCaptain
In general video players are also working. Including YouTube video playback on AVPro.
"Video players" =/= YouTube. There are more video hosting services than YouTube.
UviDawg
WubTheCaptain so theres no way to fix the issue with the youtube videos specifically, other than what, change my entire IP?
WubTheCaptain
UviDawg You may be able to get a new IP-address from your Internet service provider which may circumvent the IP-ban imposed by YouTube temporarily on your connection or disable IPv4 or IPv6 connections to YouTube, but as it stands, there is no solution to how YouTube decides to operate their platform, which users they allow/disallow to use their service, and this bug report ("Sign in to confirm you're not a bot") is not actionable.
Please note VRChat's fork of yt-dlp does not support passing logged-in cookies in VRChat, and the upstream yt-dlp project states the safer solution would be to use a different IP-address anyway.
Speculatively this may happen because yt-dlp (a generic video downloader tool) spoofs being a legitimate (older) YouTube video player when downloading videos from YouTube without any regards to advert playback or YouTube's terms of service, which may get detected sometimes as a non-compliant video player tool, or some network traffic to YouTube from your IP-address was seen as suspicious in some way. It's impossible to acertain the reason.
yt-dlp changed their default YouTube JS video player to
tv
for n/sig challenges two days ago in yt-dlp 2026.02.04, which may mean VRChat's older yt-dlp 2026.01.29 may get detected as a bot for some users for failing to solve YouTube's n/sig challenges. Updating yt-dlp may reduce the occurrence of this bot detection.UviDawg
WubTheCaptain alright i'll update it and wait until the ban is gone. here goes another few months! im glad PPalace works (as far as i know still...)
WubTheCaptain
UviDawg You'll have to wait for VRChat to update their yt-dlp fork and for you to receive this update.
The VRChat app downloads and replaces yt-dlp.exe with VRChat's own custom downstream fork of yt-dlp (currently version 2026.01.29) on every app launch, which is older than the upstream yt-dlp project (currently version 2026.02.04). The newer upstream yt-dlp 2026.02.04 contains YouTube playback / bot detection evasion fixes not yet available in VRChat.
Even then it's not guaranteed you'll not get detected as a bot by YouTube again (e.g. using a datacenter IP-address or a privacy-oriented VPN connection could likely get your IP-address flagged as a bot more frequently).
Also, replacing the yt-dlp file in VRChat manually is strongly not recommended by VRChat, according to tupper.