Problems in downloading videos from Vimeo

[Larry Or]

Hi, I have purchased a license version for Firefox.  

Trying to download the video in 1366 x 638 format from such  hyperlink: "https://vimeo.com/740703144/506fa09fb9".  The video content can't be captured but audio only in downloaded video.

In the past, there is no issue in downloading videos from Vimeo.  Please advise and thanks!

[Larry Or]

Additional information: I'm using VLC Media Player v3.0.17.4, thanks!

[dange halake]

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[Wild Willy]

I visited your web page & got this:

I downloaded the first variant on the VDH menu.  It took only a couple of minutes because I was getting a download speed in the 3-4 million bytes per second range.  I got a file that played fine in VLC.  It consisted of just a single frame of video, the image you can see in my image above.  I sampled the file at 5-minute intervals & the entire audio appeared to be there.  I didn't understand a word of what was said.  Is that Chinese?  But every time I skipped 5 minutes, the playback resumed with audio.  I let it play the last 20 seconds or so just to be sure everything was there right to the end.  Just to check, I also played the file in the web page for a few moments.  There is no video here.  Just the one still image.  If you're getting audio, that appears to be all there is here.

I'm curious about your version of VLC.  I'm on Windows & my VLC claims that version 3.0.16 is the latest.  What platform are you running on?

[Wild Willy]

I see that there has been a message deleted from this thread.  I believe this is due to the stealth quoted material that you did not remove from your post.  If you did a Reply all on my post, your post was victimized by the inclusion of mine as stealth quoted material.  That includes the image in my post.  This is not simply wasteful.  The Google bots apparently believe that posts that include large amounts of quoted text & images are spam, so your posts get censored.  You need to learn how to delete the stealth quoted material before you post.  I have posted instructions for this on this forum.  Click this:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/BzPLK2YyL-s

Then do a string search on "stealth quote" in there.  That will reposition the web page to the relevant reference.  That will give you another link you should click.  You can also find that reference by doing a search on "stealth quoting" in this forum.  That is the title of the thread containing the instructions.  That thread gives you a description in screenshots of the steps you need to take.  This should become a habit you get into with ALL your posts in ANY thread in this forum, not just this thread.

[Wild Willy]

I was inspired to revisit this.  On closer inspection, the Vimeo item given by the original poster indeed does have something more than just a single frozen image.  You have to let the video play a bit before you come to something other than that original image.  In my more in depth investigation today, I did something very much like what you can see in this other recent thread:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/QQxKhAoJwP8

The difference is that there, the video & audio were in a single file.  Here, the video & audio are in separate files.  Here's how I discovered it.  As always, I opened the Network Monitor then let the video play for a couple of seconds on the Vimeo page.   That's all you need.  Just let it play for a moment, then stop it.  Filtering on .m3u8 did not find any HLS manifest.  Filtering on .mpd did not find any DASH manifest.  Filtering on .mp4 found a few items:

At this point, it's a question of trial & error.  You have to just go through each entry in the Network Monitor & double click it.  When I double clicked the first entry, Firefox opened a new tab with this in it:

But this is a problem we have solved before.  (Credit where credit is due.  Fellow user mjs figured this bit out.)  The URL needs to be repaired.  Go into the URL bar & highlight the last section of the URL:

Then delete that string.  Then hit Enter.  You'll get this:

It seems this is an audio track without video.  That's pretty easy to figure out since there's no image visible on the page.  Pop up the context menu on the playback control, then select the "Save Audio As..." entry on the menu.  This will download the audio track to your system as an MP4.  You can also download this with VDH.

Now go back to the Vimeo page & double click the next entry in the Network Monitor.  Once again, you'll get a new Firefox tab with the error message about unsupported format & MIME type.  Correct the URL again, same as before.  This time you'll get a video but there will be no audio with this.  Look closely on the playback control bar.  You'll see the little speaker icon has a line through it, as if the audio is muted.  Clicking the icon will not change it to unmute the audio.  This is your clue that this is a video without an audio track.

Pop up the context menu as before.  This time select "Save Video As..." from the menu.  This will download the video to your system.  You can also use VDH to download this.

At this point, you will have 2 files on your system, each one about 70M-75M in size.  Those do seem like particularly small files for a video of almost 2 & 1/2 hours duration.  Have faith.  The properties I got looked like this:

Surely these files are damaged.  These properties are completely anomalous.  Again, have faith.  Go ahead & play them in VLC using the synchronous playback feature of VLC.  You can learn how to do that by searching for "synchronous" in this thread:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/BzPLK2YyL-s

It looks like this & trust me, it also has audio, although it's in a language I don't understand.  I believe it's Chinese.

If you really must have a single file you can play, you can use the VDH tool for aggregating video with audio.  Once again, go here:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/BzPLK2YyL-s

Once again, search for "synchronous" but click the second link below the search hit.

Now, the video file I downloaded appears to be only resolution 426x198 according to the Windows properties.  Given that everything else in those properties is 0, I didn't entirely trust it.  But the Media Information available from VLC during playback confirms that indeed is the resolution of this item.  I didn't investigate this any further but I suspect that lower down in the Network Monitor, it is likely that videos of higher resolution are available.  It is also possible that higher quality audio tracks may also be available.  It's up to you to find them.  Like I said, it's a process of trial & error.

Why didn't VDH list the separate audio & video tracks properly?  Beats me.  Maybe the way Vimeo presents the information to VDH is non-standard in some way.  Whatever.  You have an alternative way of getting this video.

[Wild Willy]

We've got another deleted message here.  If you removed all the stealth quoted material & your post is still getting censored, you might try E-mailing your post to the thread instead of using the web interface to post here.  I've got an explanation for that in the Table of Contents thread.  It's right above the "stealth quote" reference.

[mjs]

I don't know how vdh is able to download from Vimeo. If you use a manifest from vdh and put it in ffprobe it encounters an error. If you use a manifest which I'll show how to find then it has another problem. Take this example :  https://vimeo.com/357410110

In the network monitor filter for player , there will be a url : config?autopause=blabla

Open that to find some manifests in there but they don't work. What you'll also find are mp4 links for every video quality. So this is another way to

download from Vimeo. In some videos though not every video quality has an mp4 link.

[Wild Willy]

I looked at that player thing you pointed to in the video whose URL you posted, mjs.
You'll notice the multiple mentions in there of something called master.json. I looked
inside that & it looks like what we would probably call the master manifest. Except it's
in a format that ffprobe doesn't understand. There are partial URLs in there & base URLs
& stuff that is just tantalizing beyond my fingertips to figure out. Vimeo is just a
suburb of YouTube & I believe the master manifest for YouTube content is also some kind
of json. I did once manage to figure out a YouTube json. Actually downloaded captions,
too, although they were in a really funky format & not particularly accurate. But just
as I thought I had solved the riddle, the next YouTube video I looked at didn't lend
itself to the technique I had just used successfully on that first video. So my smugness
disappeared in about 2 minutes. What you say about resolutions . . . I do so wish you
would use the word resolution. They're not qualities. They're resolutions. The problem
is that YouTube & Vimeo use the word quality. It's the wrong word. Don't be taken in.
The right word is resolution. . . . As I started to say, you are right about not all
Vimeo content showing all the resolutions in the Network Monitor as individual MP4
entries. After I posted earlier about the original poster's Vimeo item, I did look at
all the entries I show in the image above. I ran each one through ffprobe, thinking I'd
find the other resolutions. Nope. There was only one video MP4. The others were all
audio MP4s, & they didn't all have different bit rates. In other words, some of the
audio MP4s were duplicates. The one video MP4 was the low resolution one that I
downloaded in my series of images above. I don't see any way to request a different
resolution in the media player on that page. If such a button or gear existed, that
would probably trigger the appearance in the Network Monitor of the other resolutions.
But it doesn't exist. There is such a gear in the video you found, but there isn't such
a gear in the video I downloaded earlier. With the earlier video, VDH lists a handful of
variants with various resolutions. The VDH list seems to match what I found in the
master.json for that one. So VDH appears to understand json manifests to some extent.
It appears to work well enough on YouTube but Vimeo seems to take a different approach
that baffles VDH almost as much as it baffles us. I say we are looking at what happens
when there are no international standards for presenting multimedia content on web sites,
something I've mentioned before several times. Everybody is free to bake their own
approach. So they do. I suspect that even if there were international standards, Google
would summarily exempt themselves from them & do their own thing anyway, like they do
with numerous other things, E-mail being one example. I suppose the answer is to look
for documentation on how jsons work. I'm not up to that at the moment.