The VideoLAN Forums

As of today it seems like YouTube links opened in VLC are no longer able to play. VLC does read the meta info, but stops right after that and does this with every YouTube link i tried. I tested on another computer to see if somehow my VLC had a bug, even re-installed to no avail. Most likely YouTube changed something making it impossible to play YouTube videos. I use VLC to play videos/songs from YouTube a lot and yesterday it still seemed to work. I am using VLC 2.0.3 Twoflower. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this or do i just have to wait till the development team found another way to be able to play YouTube links? Or am i doing something wrong or is my VLC media player not working properly anymore?

Hope someone can give me a bit more info or a solution.

You are not the only one - I have also tested multiple versions of VLC, and everything else you can possibly think of... and I think that YouTube has broken the code for VLC once again. This change happened recently (a few hours ago).

A prompt fix would be greatly appreciated, as my current computer is not fast enough to play Flash videos on YouTube (but VLC worked GREAT!).

We are aware of the issue and we are working on it.

Same thing here. I went all the way back to 0.8.6 in the vcl and none will play youtube anymore. I thought it was my .NetFramework messed up but it's not. Maybe a fix will be out shortly. Played great yesterday. Thanks....

Ok, great to know i am not the only one having this problem. Sadly enough it seems like indeed YouTube changed things once again and we will have to wait on a fix.
Thnx for the replys and hope the development team can fix this soon. Please reply on this thread as soon as this is fixed so i can start using YouTube with VLC again.

Good luck guys <3

me too... pls help...

Just confirming that psl's suggestion works. Tested on Chrome 21.0.1200.0 with VLC 2.0.4 32bit for Windows (from the nightly channel).

That Lua doesnt work for me, im using windows vista tried getting the link using chrome and firefox just the same thing, i paste the playlist link into VLC, it plays and loads all the videos into the playlist, but it just keeps skipping through all the videos.

Any fix? was only a few days ago it worked

Try this one: http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=bl ... adb4812576

I ran into this same problem; let me re-verbalize what psl said to do, because once I did what he suggested correctly, it repaired the problem for me. I want to explain again just in case someone else needs a step-by-step, baby-food version, as I did.

I'm using VLC 2.0.3 Twoflower on Windoze XP.

First, I went to https://gist.github.com/3729932 as psl cited.
Next, to save the file in my browser, instead of "downloading" it (which delivers the source code as a gzip'd archive non-programmer Windoze users might have trouble with), I selected the link marked "raw" in the upper right-hand corner of the panel with the source code. This will lode the youtube.lua file in a form you can save to disk as a text file.

Third, in a CMD window, I navigated to the subdirectory where VLC is installed, in my case, X:\path\path\VLC2, but the default directory may be something like "C:\Program Files\Videolan\VLC2.0.3" for most people. There's a subdirectory here called "playlist" and in it, a file called youtube.luac (which probably stands for lua-compiled, because the contents are not text).

RENAME this youtube.luac file to something else, like youtube-luac.old, and REPLACE it with the youtube.lua file you downloaded.

Start VLC again, and load your YouTube URL into it. It will play as before.

I hope this helps someone else. I didn't even know there was a whole scripting language I could use in VLC until this incident, but it took me a few moments to figure out what I needed to do. Now that I know about LUA, perhaps I can figure out ways to write a few similar scripts I need.

Thank you very much for the fix.

I hope this helps someone else. I didn't even know there was a whole scripting language I could use in VLC until this incident, but it took me a few moments to figure out what I needed to do. Now that I know about LUA, perhaps I can figure out ways to write a few similar scripts I need.

We hope you can many of those

Try this one: http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=bl ... adb4812576

Ok that one works somewhat, Thanks its not skipping the videos after loading playlist now but i do recieve this error on the first video checked a few others but they work
It played vid 2-5 ok, any ideas how to fix?

You're correct, it seems some kind of session has to be initiated, then the second item will play. So the fix is not complete yet.

Hi, I tried both fixes above and still nothing happens when I paste the youtube url. Does the lua file need to be compiled or saved in some special way (if so, how do I compile them)? I have copied the text into Notepad, saved as youtube.lua with 'All Files' option in the Save As dialog. saved it as youtube.lua in playlist directory and when I hover over it it is a LUA File.
Still ineffective.
Thanks for any advice, and thanks for the help so far.

No, it doesn't need to be compiled. Most YT links work for me, but some don't. The guys at http://www.downloadhelper.net/ also had to fix their FX extension, perhaps some code can be ported from there.

Same here. I tried both the codes above. Copied to notepad, changed the name to youtube.luac, then put it in the right folder in the playlist, but still no workie. I see it is listed , the second one anyway, second fix, at 8kb's. Does this sound correct? Also do you have a file named youtube_homepage.luac also in that folder?. Thanks...Maybe the Admins at VCL will come out with a new fixed version soon. Thanks to everyone. I tried this fix with 4 different versions of VCL. The latest version was the 2.02. Thanks again..

P/S...I did get the file by markostamcar to work. Thanks you much man. Saves a lot of cpu power in VCL over youtube. Hope others are as lucky..... Thanks to RobertKissel for telling me how to do this.....

Hi, I just registered to post this:
I use JDownloader to download my favorite videos, but it stopped on the same day the links stopped working in VLC (Aug13-14). It is fixed now just like the DownloadHelper plugin. Maybe the guys there can assist in finding the problem or there's something that can be used, as markostamcar pointed out.

I discovered that feature too late (yesterday) and have not had an opportunity to use it yet. Sorry if my english is a little weird, I'm not used to write long messages in english.

Oh, and I tried the methods described. No success.

Thanks. It working fine now. It's working for mac OSX also.

I replaced the youtube.lua file and now most youtube videos have started working again, but some still don't (for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLIerfXuZ4) doesn't work for in vlc for me. It gets the media data and tries to get the rest several times, but then stops. Anyone else have this problem?

Hi, finally got it working using the https://gist.github.com/3729932 code and saving it as .luac not .lua.
Thanks for all your help.

Sorry, spoke too soon. I can now play the videos but cannot record them. The Record button is there but nothing is recorded. Until the recent youtube change this worked fine.
ANybody else got this problem or found a solution?
Thanks

I am a fresh member of this forum and would like to say Hello to all and THANKS everybody who got involved in this issue and worked to come to this solution. I updated my VLC 's v2.0.2 yout????.luac file (XPSP3 32bit - Opera 12.02) following the step-by-step described in RobertKissel's post.

Unfortunely, there's a lot of garbage spreaded around the net with wrong or out-of-date content about VLC. I wasted significant time looking for this solution in wrong places - and tried a lot of weird solutions without success. So as much as I can, I'll try to recommend this forum as the 1st place to go when something gets misconfigurated in VLC. Thanks again!

VLC 2.0.4 will have an update for that.

I ran into this problem, and fixed it similarly to the previous person (sig -> signature).

However, I did some general cleanup as well, and here is the result if you like:
https://gist.github.com/3729932

It mainly adds a 'split' function which I saw in another plugin and uses the get_url_param function to extract the parameters, so that the order of itag/url/sig in the url_encoded_fmt_stream_map is no longer an issue.

Thanks for VLC!