Load VAE (Online)

If you've ever generated an SD 1.5 image that came out grey and desaturated - the "washed out" look - the fix was always the same: you're missing the VAE. Load VAE (Online) is this pack's answer to that, and its whole catalog is exactly one model: FT MSE Original, which is vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-v10, the community-standard SD 1.5 VAE that the troubleshooting docs tell you to download when your images look flat.

It's a thin wrapper. You pick the VAE from a dropdown, the node downloads it into your models/vae folder on first use, and from then on it's just a normal loaded VAE. The mechanism is identical to every other node in this pack - the catalog comes from DoubTech's API, no API key needed, and "online" only means the file is fetched on demand rather than expecting you to have it already.

The input and output

One input, vae_name, is a dropdown - right now it contains just the FT MSE Original entry. One output, VAE. Wire it into the VAE input of core nodes like VAE Encode, VAE Decode, or the vae socket on a checkpoint loader if you're overriding a baked-in one.

One important caveat: this is an SD 1.5 VAE. Don't route it into an SDXL or Flux pipeline and expect magic. SDXL ships its own VAE (sdxl_vae.safetensors) and Flux has one baked into the checkpoint - the "missing VAE" failure mode that this node exists to fix is basically an SD 1.5 problem. Pair it with an SD 1.5 checkpoint and a separate CLIP, and you're set.

Install

Same as the rest of the pack. In ComfyUI Manager, search "DTAIComfyLoaders" (pack title: "Comfy UI Online Loaders") and install, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/yolanother/DTAIComfyLoaders

Restart ComfyUI after. The pack's only dependency is requests; no heavy installs. It's MIT-licensed by Yolan (DoubTech), last updated late 2024.

Where people get burned

• First run downloads the VAE. It's a ~320 MB file, and the UI gives you no progress bar - the node just looks frozen while it fetches. Give it time; subsequent runs are instant.
• Dropbox link can deliver HTML instead of the model. Some catalog files sit on Dropbox, and scripted downloads can get served an HTML bot-check page. If the load fails, check models/vae - a file that's a few KB instead of hundreds of MB is the giveaway. Download the file manually and drop it in the folder; the node will pick it up and stop trying to re-fetch.
• Empty dropdown on fresh restart. The catalog loads in a background thread at startup. Re-add the node after a moment; if it's still empty, restart.

The honest take: if you run SD 1.5 regularly you already own this VAE, and the stock VAELoader does the same job. This node's real audience is the person setting up a fresh ComfyUI install who wants one less manual download. It's a convenience, not a capability upgrade.