011107 - how to select audio track before beginning download?

[hamidi]

hi

when i watch a video online, i hear an audio in a language. after downloading by download helper, i hear an audio in another language! i checked info with vlc and see that it's the only audio in the downloaded file.

how can i select between audio tracks before starting download?

[Wild Willy]

Post the URL of the web page on which your video is located.

[Juan Carlos Pérez de Barquero Cabrera]

I have the same problem with:

https://www.angel.com/watch/the-chosen/episode/8dfb714d-bca5-4812-8125-24fb9514cd10/season-1/episode-1/i-have-called-you-by-name

[mjs]

I did a test for the French track and indeed it was French. I don't know French though and I guess your after Spanish ?

When you load up the page for the video, VDH has already detected the video and audio. With the default audio in English.

If you select your language a new audio track will be in the VDH menu to the bottom.

[Wild Willy]

Over 3 months later, Juan Carlos rescues this from being yet another drive-by problem
report. Although, it might be useful to get a proper problem report from you:

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

Click that & carefully read the first 2 paragraphs. Then look for "problem report"
within the text of that web page. That will give you a link. Click it, read what you
find & follow that advice. Also check out 2 other references on that page:

short tutorial
stealth quote

But at least you gave a URL, which I checked out on my system:

Window 7 64-bit, Firefox 113.0 64-bit, licensed VDH 7.6.5a3 beta (same as 7.6.6), CoApp
1.6.3

Without launching playback, I got what you can see in attached image #01. I thought the
first 2 variants looked interesting so I downloaded them both. I changed their target
file names to First.mp4 & Second.mp4. So imaginative, right?

First downloaded in under 2 minutes. You can see the results of this download in
attached image #02. The file properties showed that It turned out to be audio without
video. I played it in VLC, sampling it quickly. But there seemed to be stretches of no
dialog. I didn't even listen to it carefully enough to determine what language the
people were speaking. I figured I'd get back to that after I also had some video to
watch.

Second, of course, took a bit longer. Video always takes longer than audio. You can
see the results of this download in attached image #03. I checked in on Resource Monitor
to see that I was getting in the vicinity of 3 million bytes per second download speed.
Reasonable, as these things go, although not exactly hyperspeed. You'll note the
resolution is reported as 1912x1088. This is something weird that VDH does to me all the
time. The video is really 1920x1080. This appears to be an anomaly, unique to my
system. I've gotten used to ignoring the issue (I can't even call it a problem). In any
case, I played Second in VLC to see what I had. My sampling revealed that I had both
audio & video all the way to the end, including the closing credits. The few spots
where I stopped long enough to get any dialog, they were speaking English.

I was then going to try playing Second as a video file & First synchronously as the audio
file. But I have somehow mysteriously lost the ability to play files synchronously in
VLC. I keep getting an error about the C++ runtime library receiving a request to
terminate the application in an unusual way. I don't know what this means. Has anybody
else been encountering this? I even went to the extreme of uninstalling VLC & installing
a new copy from the Videolan web site. It claims to be version 3.0.18 Vetinari, which I
have been using for rather a long time now. I haven't done any web searches yet for an
answer. If I find anything, I'll let you know. In any case, at this point, I listened
to First for a bit to find out what language was being used in the audio-only file I
downloaded. Turns out it is English as well, so synchronous playback would not have
revealed anything interesting at this point anyway. I'm very upset about this inability
to play files synchronously so I will defiinitely be chasing this down.

Then I decided to dig a little deeper into this. After my VDH download, I went back to
the VDH menu, as shown in attached image #04. The video with audio variant now showed a
play button, circled in the image. I decided to get more information on this. I
cascaded out the secondary VDH menu by hovering my mouse over the right end of the
variant, letting the arrow appear, then clicking the arrow. On the secondary VDH menu, I
selected Details, as shown in attached image #05. That gave me the Hit Details. I have
scrolled those down a bit & highlighted an interesting & useful bit in attached image
#06.

I copy/pasted that URL into an invocation of ffprobe, which gave the results shown in
attached image ffprobe.txt. We have an extremely interesting case here. There are 5
Programs listed, Program 0 through Program 4. Each Program includes a single Stream of
type video, with a different resolution in each Program. But we have an astonishing
array of audio Streams to choose from. The first audio Stream within each Program
appears to be a unique track. But all the other audio Streams are repeated from Program
to Program. In addition, we have subtitles in all the languages. The subtitle Streams
are also repeated in each Program.

I selected Program 2 to download since it's the one with the resolution 1920x1080. That
meant I would get video Stream 0:4. I randomly decided to get the French audio Stream
0:14 to go with it. I downloaded these 2 Streams in a single invocation of ffmpeg. You
can see the results of that download in attached file Test Videomp4 Filtered Log.txt. For
the sharp-eyed among you, I changed the name of the file from .log to .txt to satisfy the
restriction on file names imposed by Google. Also, this is a filtered log. There's a
bunch of content that ffmpeg skips during its processing. Those lines are shown in the
ffprobe results. I decided I wouldn't post them again. In this filtered log you can see
the complete ffmpeg command I used. Near the bottom of the file, you will find a report
of the size of the file, how long it took to download, & the bandwidth the server gave
me. You will also find another ffprobe report, this time on the video I downloaded.
Attached image #07 shows more results. They're pretty much the same as image #03.

I then selected Stream 0:23 for download with ffmpeg. This got me the English subtitles.
Those results are in attached file Test Videovtt Filtered Log,txt. You'll notice that
the video is named Test Video.mp4 & the subtitles are Test Video.vtt. This naming
convention allows VLC to automatically display the available subtitles. Some people
would argue that I could have included the subtitles in my first invocation of ffmpeg.
Yes, and then the subtitles would be burned into the video file. But a quick playback of
the video with the subtitles showed me that the subtitles were pretty badly out of synch
with the video. My earlier download of Second.mp4 gave me a video with English dialog.
It was apparent to me that the actors were indeed speaking English. The audio track was
in synch with their lips. So the original language of this video is English. I could
tell in the few samples that I viewed in Test Video that the English subtitles were in
advance by a few seconds compared to what I was seeing on the screen. Since I kept the
subtitles separate, I could if I were so motivated (I'm not) correct the problem using a
caption editing application. You can't do that if you burn the subtitles into the video.

How do you use ffmpeg? Go to the Table of Contents thread whose link I gave above & look
for "cannot download" within the text of that web page. That will give you a link to a
tutorial that explains everything I did here.

This is quite an interesting case. It is my understanding that Michel is looking into
the "separate video & audio" bug:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/vZaB8PRM2U0

I will draw his attention to this case. It looks like one he might like to use to
develop better support for alternate audio tracks. But if he adds such support, it
probably won't be soon. And I must emphasize "if." I have no idea what he might think
of supporting this sort of content in VDH. As things stand today, you will have to
abandon VDH in favor of ffmpeg in order to get the audio track in your preferred language
for this video.

Well, OK. mjs has come up with a way to get VDH to offer you whatever language you want.
It's an extra step. I hope Michel agrees to enhance VDH so this extra step is not
necessary. In any case, if you want the subtitles, the only way to do that -- TODAY --
is with ffmpeg.

[Wild Willy]

Further to my inability to play files synchronously in VLC, my solution is here:

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=151100