The VideoLAN Forums

Sup! After trying to convert a youtube video to mp3 (don't want to use those sites with ad banners all over the place), the first problem I faced was that it failed to play some googleusercontent (or something like that) MRL. So I went to Google to troubleshoot and a video adviced to change youtube.luac to youtube.lua and copy contents from the same youtube.lua file that is in videolan's official github repo for the player. I did exactly that and now when I enter the youtube link and then choose mp3 as the output, it just plays the video as if I pressed Open Network Stream. What can I do to fix it?

UPD: Even after removing this lua file and reinstalling VLC (without uninstalling it, the .luac file came back after I did that), so there's only the original youtube.luac and other previously untouched luac files in the folder this problem stil persists. I don't have 'Failed to play MRL' anymore, but I can't convert a yotuube video to mp3 cause it just starts playing it.

The conversion wizard cannot handle playlists, and youtube.lua presents YouTube videos as single item playlists.

AFAIK, you have to use the VLC CLI (or another dedicated CLI tool such as YT-DLP).

The conversion wizard cannot handle playlists, and youtube.lua presents YouTube videos as single item playlists.

AFAIK, you have to use the VLC CLI (or another dedicated CLI tool such as YT-DLP).

That's a letdown. But thank you anyway! You must already know this, but there's also another way, when playing a youtube video from VLC one could just press Ctrl + J and copy the direct link to the file that then can be pasted to the wizard, so I'll be doing it that way from now on.

You can also take the hyperlong temporary video URL and convert that one, if that's what you mean. But that is time-limited.

You can also take the hyperlong temporary video URL and convert that one, if that's what you mean. But that is time-limited.

Yes, I probably meant it, the big URL that leads to a raw video file.

the audio file from a youtube video is OPUS codec, just download that file using downloadhelper plugin for firefox.
no need to convert to MP3, modern devices will play OPUS just fine.