Video Players#

AVPro-based video players have been notoriously buggy on Linux in the past. Luckily, these issues are mostly fixed now.

In VRChat, livestreamed content uses the RTSP or HLS protocols. RTSP is common at live events, and often is distrubuted via VRCDN. HLS (with MPEG-TS) is what’s used by YouTube live streams, Twitch, and Popcorn Palace.

Proton-RTSP#

We recommend using Proton-RTSP for VRChat, as it contains extra fixes for Wine’s implementation of Windows Media Foundation that AVPro uses to load video content. Most notably, it fixes the playback of RTSP and HLS streams - the live streaming protocols mentioned above. Sometimes RTSP streams will require 1 or more manual re-syncs to start.

Only use this with VRChat; no other game is supported.

❗ Important

Don’t forget to unlock H264, see below!

Proton-RTSP is known to be stable, and the majority of video content should be working correctly. If you encounter any issues with either of these points, please report them as soon as possible to one of these spaces:

The latest version at the time of writing is: Proton-RTSP-11.0-20260609-4

Unlock H264 in Proton#

Most video content in VRChat uses the H264 video codec. Steam disables H264 by default on Linux, for patent licensing reasons. This means H264 must be explicitly unlocked in Steam before it is available in-game.

To unlock H264 click this link or run this command in a terminal: (This doesn’t output anything, regardless of whether it succeeded or failed.)

xdg-open steam://unlockh264

You can also optionally verify whether or not you’ve unlocked H264:

bash -c '
for conf in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/*/config/localconfig.vdf; do
    awk "/\"PersonaName\"[[:space:]]*/{ printf \"For username \" \$2 \": \" }" < "$conf"
    awk "/\"streaming_v2\"/,/^[[:space:]]*}/{ if (match(\$0, /\"UnlockedH264Feature\"/) != 0) { gsub(/\"/,\"\",\$2); val = \$2 } } END { printf \"H264 is \"; if (val == 1) { print \"unlocked!\" } else if (val == 0) { print \"locked\" } else { print \"unknown: \" val } }" < "$conf"
done
'

It’s unknown whether you need to restart Steam and/or VRChat for unlocking to take effect, but just to be safe, it’s better to do it. Also, this script doesn’t work for Flatpak Steam.

Stream from video player to ffplay/MPV#

You may choose to watch live streams on a WayVR overlay. While audio effects won’t work, you will surely not have stability issues.

When in a VRChat world, if a video player fails to play, you can instead run this script.

You might need to adapt it in case you installed VRChat in another disk and not in your home folder.

It essentially grabs the URL from the VRChat logs and opens it in ffplay (for RTMP streams) or MPV.