Patched yt-dlp.exe for VRChat

Nearly everything in this tutorial can be done while the game is running and in an instance, any change will be loaded on the next player video load

01. Copy patched yt-dlp.exe files

Below are the patched yt-dlp.exe files for VRChat. Download the zip file and extract the contents to the VRChat Tools folder.

C:\Users\"your username"\AppData\LocalLow\VRChat\VRChat\Tools\

Download yt-dlp_vrc_patched.zip (13.4MB)
yt-dlp_vrc_patch.zip

02. Set yt-dlp.exe Read-only

Right-click on yt-dlp.exe and select Properties. Check the Read-only box and click Apply.

VRChat will overwrite this exe on every instance join, so you will need to set it to read-only to prevent this.

yt-dlp_vrc_patch.zip

03a. Generate the yt-dlp.conf

Provided in the zip file is a bat file (01. create-config.bat) that will generate the yt-dlp.conf file for you.


If this does not work, you can create the yt-dlp.conf file manually by creating a new text file and renaming it to yt-dlp.conf

Inside the yt-dlp.conf file, paste the following:

--cookies "C:\Users\YOUR USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\VRChat\VRChat\Tools\cookies.txt"

03b. Get cookies.txt using the script

This works for the most common browsers, requires browser to be completley closed

Provided in the zip file is a bat file (02. update-cookies.bat) that will generate the cookies.txt file for you.

Run this bat file and it will generate the cookies.txt file for you.

03c. Get cookies.txt from your browser

Open whichever browser you are signed into YouTube with and use the extension below to export your cookies

(Chrome based browsers) Get cookies.txt locally
(Firefox) Get cookies.txt LOCALLY

Once you have the cookies.txt file, place it in the VRChat Tools folder next to yt-dlp.exe

yt-dlp_vrc_patch.zip

04. Explanation

VRChat uses yt-dlp to grab the m3u8 link from YouTube videos. This patched version of yt-dlp.exe will use the cookies.txt file to bypass bot checks for vpn users

VRChat's yt-dlp.exe removes the --cookies flag so we cannot pass login cookies to yt-dlp.

VRChat also uses some custom flags which are not available in the original yt-dlp.exe leading to it erroring out if you try using the official yt-dlp.exe

By using this patched version of yt-dlp.exe the custom flags are ignored and the --cookies flag is left enabled.

05. Troubleshooting

I will add these later, along with my source code and a few updates to this page.

For now contact me directly for issues.

Please run the (03. get-test-log.bat) and send both its log and the vrchat log from the session in which the video player is broken

Discord: lilprincess_uwu

Email: vrcdlp@lilprincess.xyz