Potentially OT. Videos lagging & buffering in any browser but Google Chrome.

[Juan R.D. Silva]

Hi folks,

Debian Bullseye here up to date. Browsers installed: Firefox, Opera,
Vivaldi, and Google Chrome.

I'm having a weird problem streaming movies from archive.org. The movies
are lagging & keep buffering in all browsers but Google Chrome. Google
Chrome streams same movies at the same time without any stuttering.

So far I've notices it using on archive.org only, so I'm not sure if the
problem is on my side or on archive.org. The problem is rather recent
but persistent and in last days get really bad.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[Cindy Sue Causey]

At first, I just came in to say, "Yeah, me, too." It's with CSI (Las
Vegas style) on pluto(dot)tv. Since I background that as a mood
enhancer, I pretty much don't notice. When viewed, it seems to somehow
aesthetically fit that series.

Pinterest website has been doing weird things, too. Last few days I'm
lucky if a fifth of each of their webpages loads. If I want to view
the videos they're pushing, I have to copy and paste over to Google
Chrome. Pinterest then pretty much runs seamlessly on that, too.

Since you've tested several other web browsers, I wonder if they're
all using something similar, thus similarly buggy, as a building block
in their projects. Important to note is mine is straight from
Mozilla's website. I can't remember what was buggy, but that's always
the reason I go straight to them out of exasperation.

Next it came to mind to think maybe there's a setting buried within
each browser's preferences. And so I checked Firefox. There's a
picture-in-picture option that I just toggled OFF.

Just rebooted because something was odd with RAM (2.5GB still in use)
after all program were closed. That step-by-step download buffering
effect isn't showing on Firefox now, at least in my case, I suppose it
could be about multiple copies somehow conflicting.. or something
along those lines, anyway. Time will tell if it's about something else
should the buffering effect start up again.

Instead of wading through installing Opera and Vivaldi, I hit up a
search engine. Both browsers can be found offering tips on how to set
their own picture-in-picture offerings.

Google Chrome has it, too, but it was hard to find. Mine's under
chrome://flags (per the Internet) then search for picture-in-picture.
It's set at default then also offers enabled and disabled. I can't
tell which mine is set at, and I'm not up for experimenting.
Experiments is coincidentally a word you'll see if you visit that
address.

One last thought is I read somewhere that ISPs, especially smaller
ones, have been caught throttling users based on type of usage even
though the same ISPs label their services as unlimited. Conspiracy
theories tossed aside, that's still a rational possibility that needs
pursued on my end here.

BUT THEN... Google Chrome does work properly. That's why I haven't
wasted any time nor brain storage on actively investigating local ISP
throttling as a most likely answer. :)

For whatever it's worth in their parts as players, I'm using:

* Sid identifying itself to hardinfo as Debian 12 Bookworm
* Kernel 6.1.20-1 (2023-03-19) x86_64
* AMD A10-5750M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
* pavucontrol to toggle sounds on LXQt desktop
* 16GB RAM that Firefox REGULARLY eats alive thus triggering ongoing restarts
* Zero SWAP in use with 8GB unmounted on standby if needed
* 2.56 GHz quad core that seems to never change from 2500 according to
hardinfo. In the past, other laptops have fluctuated all over their
respective ranges.

Probably overkill in sharing, but you never know what ultimately might
be a causative.

Cindy :)

Update: Pinterest is still not working. PlutoTV's CSI is still running
much more smoothly a couple of hours after toggling picture-in-picture
off, BUT I think I'm starting to see a small hint of buffering coming
back. "free -m" shows RAM at 7.4GB available. It will be a couple
hours before that gets eaten up. When it does, that will help show how
much of an effect memory has in my instance of this.

Notable: Back over at Firefox again: Under its Settings > Privacy &
Security, I accidentally found the following likewise toggled ON:

Firefox Data Collection and Use
* Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
* Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations
* Allow Firefox to install and run studies
* Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf

Included for whatever it's worth since the topic of browsers' negative
effect on computer memory seems to come up enough to be considered a
thing... that would help make it a suspect in this buffering question.

--
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *

[rhkr...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, March 26, 2023 04:21:00 PM Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
> One last thought is I read somewhere that ISPs, especially smaller
> ones, have been caught throttling users based on type of usage even
> though the same ISPs label their services as unlimited. Conspiracy
> theories tossed aside, that's still a rational possibility that needs
> pursued on my end here.
>
> BUT THEN... Google Chrome does work properly. That's why I haven't
> wasted any time nor brain storage on actively investigating local ISP
> throttling as a most likely answer. :)

I suspect my ISP (Earthlink) may be throttling me. Not too long ago, I could
watch (stream) TV programs on PlutoTV (on my DSL line (I know)) but could not
stream movies (and I assumed the movies might have had a higher resolution and
thus required more bandwidth).

But, a few months ago, I was no longer able to stream TV shows.

I guess I could run a speed check on my line and compare to some older
results, but I can imagine the speed test could be fooled (maybe they've
throttled my connection either for specific IPs / websites, or maybe for
specific "classes" of data.

Any other suggestions?

--
rhk

(sig revised 20230312 -- modified first paragraph, some other irrelevant
wordsmithing)

| No entity has permission to use this email to train an AI.

If you reply: snip, snip, and snip again; leave attributions; avoid HTML;
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liberal use of whitespace (short paragraphs, separated by whitespace / blank
lines) and minimal use of (obscure?) jargon, abbreviations, acronyms, and
references.

If someone has already responded to a question, decide whether any response
you add will be helpful or not ...

A picture is worth a thousand words. A video (or "audio"): not so much --
divide by 10 for each minute of video (or audio) or create a transcript and
edit it to 10% of the original.

A speaker who uses ahhs, ums, or such may have a real physical or mental
disability, or may be showing disrespect for his listeners by not properly
preparing in advance and thinking before speaking. (That speaker might have
been "trained" to do this by being interrupted often if he pauses.) (Remember
Cicero who did not have enough time to write a short missive.)

A radio (or TV) station which broadcasts speakers with high pitched voices (or
very low pitched / gravelly voices) (which older people might not be able to
hear properly) disrespects its listeners. Likewise if it broadcasts
extraneous or disturbing sounds (like gunfire or crying), or broadcasts
speakers using their native language (with or without an overdubbed
translation).

A person who writes a sig this long probably has issues and disrespects (and
offends) a large number of readers. ;-)
'

[Bret Busby]

On 30/3/23 19:11, rhkr...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, March 26, 2023 04:21:00 PM Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
>> One last thought is I read somewhere that ISPs, especially smaller
>> ones, have been caught throttling users based on type of usage even
>> though the same ISPs label their services as unlimited. Conspiracy
>> theories tossed aside, that's still a rational possibility that needs
>> pursued on my end here.
>>
>> BUT THEN... Google Chrome does work properly. That's why I haven't
>> wasted any time nor brain storage on actively investigating local ISP
>> throttling as a most likely answer. :)
>
> I suspect my ISP (Earthlink) may be throttling me. Not too long ago, I could
> watch (stream) TV programs on PlutoTV (on my DSL line (I know)) but could not
> stream movies (and I assumed the movies might have had a higher resolution and
> thus required more bandwidth).
>
> But, a few months ago, I was no longer able to stream TV shows.
>
> I guess I could run a speed check on my line and compare to some older
> results, but I can imagine the speed test could be fooled (maybe they've
> throttled my connection either for specific IPs / websites, or maybe for
> specific "classes" of data.
>
> Any other suggestions?
>

I am wondering whether the problem with the streaming, involves changes
made by the streaming hosts.

I had previously been able to use youtube-dl, to download videos from
youtube, but, it no longer works with youtube.

And, I had been able to download videos from some streaming hosts, but,
find that I cannot download videos from other streaming hosts.

By download, I mean saving to my computer - so that I can get
continuity, and, replay the streamed videos at slower speeds, and,
manipulate the sound, so that I (having a hearing disability that
affects my ability to hear what is spoken) can better hear what is being
said, which is important for educational videos, such as at Rootstech
2023, where I cannot download significant videos.

..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............

[Curt]

On 2023-03-30, Bret Busby <br...@busby.net> wrote:
>
> I had previously been able to use youtube-dl, to download videos from
> youtube, but, it no longer works with youtube.
>

If you're not using the latest version, this is it:

https://youtube-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl-2021.12.17.tar.gz

I used this (or maybe a previous version) not too long ago, and it worked
as intended.

[David Wright]

On Thu 30 Mar 2023 at 19:31:21 (+0800), Bret Busby wrote:

> I had previously been able to use youtube-dl, to download videos from
> youtube, but, it no longer works with youtube.

AIUI youtube-dl is now obsolete, and its new spelling is yt-dlp.

You can download it from bullseye-backports. If you're a backports
user, just install it and check out the CLI options you normally
use, in case they've been tweaked, with:

$ yt-dlp -help | less

> And, I had been able to download videos from some streaming hosts,
> but, find that I cannot download videos from other streaming hosts.
>
> By download, I mean saving to my computer - so that I can get
> continuity, and, replay the streamed videos at slower speeds, and,
> manipulate the sound, so that I (having a hearing disability that
> affects my ability to hear what is spoken) can better hear what is
> being said, which is important for educational videos, such as at
> Rootstech 2023, where I cannot download significant videos.

The yt-dlp dependencies are all unversioned, so rather than put
backports into my sources.list, I just checked that I had them all,
downloaded yt-dlp….deb from the Packages page, and installed it with
the apt-get install /full-path-to/yt-dlp….deb syntax.
(The backports youtube-dl package used to get very long in the tooth
at times, so I've done this frequently in the past.) Whenever
downloading fails, I check out whether there's a more up-to-date
version with the yt-dlp -U option.

Apparently there's a bug in yt-dlp at the moment, but I don't think
either of us uses mpv /with/ the downloader, but only /after/
downloading has completed.

Cheers,
David.

[Bret Busby]

I had downloaded and installed yt-dlp, but, that did not work, either.

[David Wright]

> I had downloaded and installed yt-dlp, but, that did not work, either.

Writing "did not work" just doesn't cut it on this list:
we need some specifics. Here's an example I ran this
morning on a reference given by David Christensen:

$ gy bKzonnwoR2I
/usr/bin/yt-dlp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKzonnwoR2I
[youtube] Extracting URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKzonnwoR2I
[youtube] bKzonnwoR2I: Downloading webpage
[youtube] bKzonnwoR2I: Downloading android player API JSON
[info] bKzonnwoR2I: Downloading 1 format(s): 248+251
[download] Destination: Unix Pipeline (Brian Kernighan) - Computerphile [bKzonnwoR2I].f248.webm
[download] 100% of 50.64MiB in 00:00:05 at 8.45MiB/s
[download] Destination: Unix Pipeline (Brian Kernighan) - Computerphile [bKzonnwoR2I].f251.webm
[download] 100% of 3.85MiB in 00:00:00 at 6.28MiB/s
[Merger] Merging formats into "Unix Pipeline (Brian Kernighan) - Computerphile [bKzonnwoR2I].webm"
Remember to remove any unmerged files as appropriate.
$

Whether you can download that would determine where you go from here.

Cheers,
David.

[to...@tuxteam.de]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 01:08:19PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> On Fri 31 Mar 2023 at 01:41:04 (+0800), Bret Busby wrote:

[...]

> Writing "did not work" just doesn't cut it on this list:
> we need some specifics. Here's an example I ran this
> morning on a reference given by David Christensen:

This is more or less I thought at the first post: "not
work" doesn't work here.

For me, youtube-dl works most of the time. But this will
almost certainly be a complex function of the downloader's
location and the video in question, so...

One thing I found out is that youtube-dl's cache seems to
suffer poisoning from time to time (no wonder, with all that
toxic javascript out there). A timely

youtube-dl --rm-cache-dir

got it unstuck for me once (meaning that a video which threw
a 403 before downloaded nicely after).

YMMV and things.

Cheers
--
t

[Bret Busby]

Fri Mar 31 02:18:31 bret@bret-Precision-Tower-5810:~$yt-dlp
https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng
[generic]
expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng:
Requesting header
WARNING: [generic] Falling back on generic information extractor.
[generic]
expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng:
Downloading webpage
[generic]
expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng:
Extracting information
ERROR: Unsupported URL:
https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng
Fri Mar 31 02:19:05 bret@bret-Precision-Tower-5810:~$

[l0f...@tuta.io]

Hello,

30 mars 2023, 20:46 de br...@busby.net:

> Fri Mar 31 02:18:31 bret@bret-Precision-Tower-5810:~$yt-dlp https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng
> [generic] expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng: Requesting header
> WARNING: [generic] Falling back on generic information extractor.
> [generic] expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng: Downloading webpage
> [generic] expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng: Extracting information
> ERROR: Unsupported URL: https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/expanding-your-family-tree-with-sideview-and-more-innovations-from-ancestrydna?lang=eng
> Fri Mar 31 02:19:05 bret@bret-Precision-Tower-5810:~$
>

yt-dlp cannot download videos from every and each websites on the internet.

You can find the compatible websites here: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/supportedsites.md

In your case, yt-dlp falls back on its generic extractor (documentation says "Generic downloader that works on some sites") but it doesn't work for familysearch.org visibly...

As mentioned by David, you should try the following command to see (hopefully) that your yt-dlp works just fine:
yt-dlp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKzonnwoR2I

l0f4r0

[l0f...@tuta.io]

Hello Brad,

30 mars 2023, 23:20 de br...@fineby.me.uk:

> >In your case, yt-dlp falls back on its generic extractor (documentation
> >says "Generic downloader that works on some sites") but it doesn't work
> >for familysearch.org visibly...
>

> Largely, I suspect, it's because to access video on that FamilySearch
> page, one is required to be logged in. IDK whether yt-dlp can handle
> that.
>
Interesting theory but I can play that specific video in my browser without being logged in ;)

l0f4r0

[Brad Rogers]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 22:55:05 +0200 (CEST)
l0f...@tuta.io wrote:

Hello l0f...@tuta.io,

>In your case, yt-dlp falls back on its generic extractor (documentation
>says "Generic downloader that works on some sites") but it doesn't work
>for familysearch.org visibly...

Largely, I suspect, it's because to access video on that FamilySearch
page, one is required to be logged in. IDK whether yt-dlp can handle
that.

--
Regards _ "Valid sig separator is {dash}{dash}{space}"
/ ) "The blindingly obvious is never immediately apparent"
/ _)rad "Is it only me that has a working delete key?"
Success defined by acquisition stinks
Money is Not Our God - Killing Joke

[l0f...@tuta.io]

Hi,

30 mars 2023, 23:56 de debia...@potentially-spam.de-bruyn.de:

> I was successful at downloading the video with:
>
>> yt-dlp --verbose -k --ignore-config -c https://manifest.prod.boltdns.net/manifest/v1/hls/v4/clear/1241706627001/83ddeca4-2e3a-4149-840f-0ca907c2cb59/10s/master.m3u8?fastly_token=NjQyNjYyOWZfOTIzNjUyM2MwN2JlZTI3NjdhNDcwMjM4ZjhmNmY1MmRiZTQxMzM5ZTllOTYyM2E3YTkxZWNhOGQxYmY1YTU0OA%3D%3D
>>
>
> after finishing download, i found the file
>
>> master-master.mp4
>>
Indeed, well done.
Actually, it works as well without any yt-dlp option/switch.

How do you get that URL? Via your browser resource/code inspector?

l0f4r0

[Bret Busby]

>
> 30 mars 2023, 23:56 de debia...@potentially-spam.de-bruyn.de:
>
>> I was successful at downloading the video with:
>>
>>> yt-dlp --verbose -k --ignore-config -c https://manifest.prod.boltdns.net/manifest/v1/hls/v4/clear/1241706627001/83ddeca4-2e3a-4149-840f-0ca907c2cb59/10s/master.m3u8?fastly_token=NjQyNjYyOWZfOTIzNjUyM2MwN2JlZTI3NjdhNDcwMjM4ZjhmNmY1MmRiZTQxMzM5ZTllOTYyM2E3YTkxZWNhOGQxYmY1YTU0OA%3D%3D
>>>
>>
>> after finishing download, i found the file
>>
>>> master-master.mp4
>>>

If you (the poster who managed to download the video, using the above
command and URL) happen to remember how you got to the URL, please
either post the steps to the list, or, send to me direct, as I have two
more videos from Rootstech 2023, that I want to download, that they have
not yet (and are therefore, unlikely to be) uploaded to youtube for
viewing/downloading, and, I have problems with the streaming of videos,
in that the streams get blocked/broken, causing continuity problems in
the videos.

And, whilst I have tried applying the Rootstech web site videos' URL's,
in vlc, to view/capture streaming videos in vlc, that does not work.
vlc is the only Linux application of which I am aware, that would be
likely to download/capture the videos direct from the Rootstech web
site, and, as I cannot get that to work, the only means that I believe
that is available, for downloading the videos, if the process can be
determined, for achieving the downloadable videos as above, is similarly
through using yt-dlp, through the web site at manifest.prod.boltdns.net
.

But, I have no idea as to how to get to the path, for each of the videos
that I want, within or through that web site.

Thank you in anticipation.