With other brands of headsets, when using Steam VR, simply opening YouTube in the browser will display the VR headset icon. Your headset doesn’t have this feature, and I’ve tried opening YouTube through various apps, but that didn’t work either. There’s DeoVR, which has its own 360 videos, and they open, but if you open YouTube through it, the videos are flat. So how do you open 360 videos on YouTube? It’s the main site for 360 videos!
I wish there is a dedicate Youtube VR app but there isn’t one that I know. I am not sure if DeoVR support Youtube 3D either. Eventually, I just say forget the whole thing and the reason for that is because you can never get high quality 360 Youtube video no matter what because if you’re viewing it in 360, it needs to be at least 8k or 12k for it be high quality but the technology and the internet isn’t fast enough to stream such high quality yet. Now if you watch it in 180 degrees, then it’s pretty good in just 4K. Of course, 8K would be even better.
Afaik, Whirligig can play YT video links. However, its best to download them first in max quality (there are extensions for Firefox/Librewolf browsers for that, or dedicated apps like 4kvideodownloader) cuz like reptilexcq said, streaming them isnt working very well. But be prepared for alot of compression artifacts even after downloading the vids, especially in dark scenes.
This probably isn’t the issue you’re having, but on the off chance it is I’ll share an issue I had. For a very long time I had a lot of trouble consistently getting WebXR content to run on my Crystal. I thought there was some driver confliction i was having and went through a process of reinstalling windows multiple times thinking that was the issue and trying to narrow it down.
The problem was actually launch order. Turns out Chromium-based browsers enumerate available XR devices when their background process first starts, before you even open a tab. If that happens before Pimax play, the headset and SteamVR are running, the browser locks in “no headset found” and won’t recover. Closing and reopening the browser doesn’t fix it because Chromium keeps background processes running even after you close the window.
The only fix for me once its in this state is a full PC reboot. So the rule for me is: get SteamVR running and the headset connected before opening any browser. Closing and reopening the browser, steamvr or pimax play will not sort it out.
I’m still not 100% what the precise thing is that needs to be running before any browser gets opened, im assuming pimaxPlay as that’s something i disable from auto start with windows but I make sure everything is running first and that’s been 100% successful.
In addition to the above, make sure your browser has the right flags enabled for that browser to run vr content, but you said it worked on other devices so I assume they are.