Unable to open Youtube video from VLC on Linux/Ubuntu

[N2TE]

Accessing Youtube video content via VLC on my iMac computer works fine. (Query for update indicates v3.0.16 is current version.)
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However I am unable to access YT video content when using VLC on my Linux machines. (Ubuntu 18.04, VLC v3.0.8 ) Are there different version releases for different OS platforms?
There are numerous "solutions" posted online of a specific fix this particular problem which all seem to advise doing the same thing.
1. Go to a particular github page and COPY the LATEST text for a youtube.luac file. https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/ma ... outube.lua
2. Open a text editor, PASTE that text into any text editor and then save it to a file called "youtube.luac" in the appropriate "playlist" folder for your particular OS. (In my case: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/vlc/lua/playlist
3. Relaunch VLC and all should be good. Seems quite simple. But it DOESN'T work and doesn't fix the problem.
I'm puzzled. In that appropriate "playlist" folder on my Linux machine(s) I DO see OTHER ".luac" files already in that folder and ALL of those other .luac files are not "text" files, but rather some type of binary files. (?) So is there some other intermediate step needed to compile(?) or process this text that I just copied from that github page and and saved as a .luac file? I've got the latest file but it's in text format as I've said. What am I missing here?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Conventionally. you should delete youtube.luac and save the source code as youtube.lua.

That said, source code is slightly slower than tokenised Lua code, but the format is detected automatically.

[N2TE]

Thank you for your suggestion. However it still doesn't work. Since the existing file "youtube.luac" that was there (created by me) in that playlist folder was previously saved as a TEXT file, (my error) I merely renamed it to "youtube.lua" by removing the letter "c". I relaunched VLC and the SAME error occurred again:
Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info? ... &el=detail'.
Check the log for details.
Now what? What can I try next? Suggestions?
Thanks.