It has something to do with VRChat's modifications to yt-dlp. If you download the same version yt-dlp.exe from https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2025.03.27/yt-dlp.exe and drop it in %homepath%\AppData\LocalLow\VRChat\VRChat\Tools\ while VRChat is running, the issue is gone.

Basically everyday, your youtube world does not play videos only if I am lucky it plays 1 video. It doesn’t play many videos with others either. Please work on this problem. Good day.

clearing cache worked yesterday but not just now

Please fix this...

yep same for me

I've experienced this across different worlds, including YouTube video player world's and VRDancing. We've tried VPNs and a Video Cacher and it's still broken for me. Pushing for this to be fixed!!

There's certainly an issue with age-restricted videos that never used to be present. You can see yt-dlp fail at age-restricted videos in the console, advising that you need to log in to view the video and will fail loading. VRChat acts - and rightly so I suppose - like a logged out browser. I think this trips some people up.

yt-dlp has switches for using a logged in YT account cache or something I believe... but I doubt VRChat would configure that considering that minors also use the platform.

I also suspect that videos that roll ads during also cause issues. Of the links that syncpulse posted below, the "reliable" link does not roll ads. The other link however has pre, post AND 6 mid-roll ads... which could be messing with yt-dlp downloading them properly.

This is a pretty neat site that gives you a whole bunch of information about any given YT link, so might help determining some common factors~

Can confirm, I've joined world instances (even ones that were open less than an hour), and the video failed to load. Resync 2-5 times, and I might get it working.

I will add...I've noticed an increase of videos I choose to link in to watch, cannot be played unless logged into Youtube (somehow). Videos I do not see any reason to require a signin. Not copyrighted, not adult-focused... I first thought it was the rumor of Youtube adding DRM to videos, but that rumor was shut down a day or so later.

Lastly, and this only happened to me once. I had recently downloaded a channel's series of videos, as they had a spike of videos being taken down (r/datahoarder). That same day, I think three days in a row, I couldn't watch any youtube videos unless I was signed in. Confirmed on a browser I don't normally use and wasn't signed into (Edge, lol).

Can confirm that my world (Karaoke in Sync) uses an external server that redirects to the YouTube videos as well. Thanks for digging into that syncpulse

We have been seeing this issue in YTS as well.

I did some debugging last weekend and the issue seems to be somehow caused by (or maybe exacerbated by) YT links being reached through redirects.

What we saw is that when a given youtube.com URL is reached through an HTTP 302 redirect, VRC will log a successful resolve of the direct googlevideo URL, but then this will sometimes immediately fire VideoError.PlayerError upon playback. Crucially, when putting the exact same resolved URL from the logs back into VRC's video player, or into external playback software, it will play correctly. When directly putting the youtube.com URL into the player (the same youtube.com URL which is the target of the redirect), I saw a 100% playback success rate.

The aforementioned testing was done with a simple nginx webserver configured with a static 302 redirect, in order to rule out any possible issue with the YTS application itself. However we believe that the VRC log showing a successful yt-dlp resolve completely rules out any server-side issue anyway -- it would not have gotten that far if the server failed to redirect properly. Since playback was working with a 100% success rate when not going through the redirect, this should also rule out any IP blocking from youtube being the culprit.

It is happening with both UnityVideo and AVPro based players in multiple worlds.

The issue is sporadic, and while I was able to replicate it on my own PC last week, I no longer can. But our statistics show no reduction in playback failure rate, and we are still receiving reports from users of these symptoms. Unfortunately it's hard to get users to cooperate for testing or provide logs.

Like OP we also observe that this issue mostly began on the 28th.

We had not opened an issue so far, as I wanted to gather enough evidence that this cannot be dismissed as just another case of youtube playing cat and mouse.

A graph of our playback error rates over time is attached.

Edit: One more piece of info, I was able to test with someone for whom the issue occurs. It seems to be video-specific. One test video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw) worked reliably, both redirected and directly. However another (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_dzqZXgMg) shows the behavior of not working reliably through a redirect. I have https://vrctest.natalie.ee/test redirecting to the latter.