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Fix Choppy Streaming YouTube Video In VLC

I read about someone having issues with streaming YouTube videos using VLC and found out that I had the same issues. Research online found a lot of little tweaks that didn’t work. But I finally found a solution that did.

Here is the link to my test video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUUa7NOEJn8 (Noble M400 – Forza Horizon 5 |Logitech G29 gameplay – 4K 60FPS – Geforce RTX 3090)

According to VLC, here is the codec information:

The video quality was perfect, but it would play a bit then freeze up (I assume buffering) and then play some more. Very choppy.

The solution was to replace a file called youtube.luac with a more updated version. I found that file here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/videolan/vlc/master/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua

Save it on your hard drive. In Opera I went to the Opera menu, big reg O in the top left-hand corner of the browser clicked on Page, then Save as… It saved as a text file called youtube.lua.txt.

Then you have to rename the file, drop the .txt at the end and add a c so it reads youtube.luac

Now you have to go to the following path and replace the file there. Make sure VLC is closed at this point.

C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\playlist

The first thing I did was to rename the original there to youtube.luac.bac. This keeps the original just in case. You will probably get security prompts while messing with these files. I clicked on Continue when they popped up.

When I had renamed the original, I then copied the new version that I downloaded into this folder. And that’s it.

When I then opened VLC, then Media, then Open Network Stream, and put in the web address of the YouTube video, no more choppiness. Problem solved.

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