Vistanz
As we all know, YouTube is getting stricter on usage of yt-dlp now days, and causes trouble on viewing them in VRChat. I have discover a way that can effectively get around it, which is
--cookies
argument.
Good news is yt-dlp itself supports accepting additional arguments by putting a
yt-dlp.conf
file alongside with it.
But here is the twist, VRChat's custom build took away support of
--cookies
argument, make it no way to do so unless we manually replaces the executable to the original build.
Here is how I found it works:
  1. Creating the config file with provided cookies as yt-dlp documented in the Tools folder: It complains unrecognize
    --cookies
    argument. (Indicates we can use config file passes additional arguments)
  2. Replaces yt-dlp with official build: It complains unable creates temp directory. (Indicates official build also works for VRChat)
  3. Use
    icacls
    with
    /setintegritylevel medium
    : Works, but everytime VRChat reloads the executable replaced with VRChat custom build. (Indicates previous issue just caused by Windows security design)
So I hope VRChat can at least enable
--cookies
argument for the custom yt-dlp build, the rest can be handle by users themselves (extract login session with browser extensions such as "Get cookies.txt LOCALLY" then feed to yt-dlp with config file).