Can't download from arte.tv

[Ingo62]

While download works nicely anyplace else, I can't find a way to download from arte.tv. Is this a known, and permanent restriction? I think to recall it worked in the part, despite having to download video and audio separately ... but I may be mistaken. Any thoughts?

Using version 8.0.0.6 with Firefox 118.0.1 on MacOS 14.1 (beta)

[mjs]

arte is one of those sites where it doesn't show the download progressing. The progress bar doesn't move but it is working.

The Task Manager in Windows shows cpu, disk, and network activity for the companion app. Your on a Mac, there must be something similar

available. The video and audio is still separate which is another issue.

If you use the latest beta for Firefox along with the latest companion app then you can use a new way to download called

quick side download and side download. And this did show a progress of the download.

So either wait for the Firefox extension to be updated or get the new beta now with the latest companion app.

I don't normally use the beta extension but I have it in a separate Firefox profile. I still have 8.0.0.6 in the default profile.

Important: To reply use Reply all and delete everything after clicking show quoted text button.

--

A vdh user

[Ingo62]

I'll give the beta a try.

Following your advise with 8.0.0.6 I found that by ignoring the 4k, 1080, 720, etc selection list and selecting the "some hundreds" kB files I can get video and audio in 720p (apparently the file sizes are wrong ... should read MB instead of kB) and join them with iMovie (couldn't figure out using VLC 3.0.18 on MacOS). Selecting any of the resolution list stayed for hours without moving ...

[Ingo62]

@mjs  - agains thanks for the hint with the latest beta code. I can download from ARTE with it. However, now the challenge is that iMovie does not recognize any of the video downloads as valid MP4 files, but recognizes the AAC Audio-only MP4 only - tried 4k and 2k.

https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/RC-022884/costa-rica-der-natur-zur-seite-stehen/

Only by downloading the 720p the resulting MP4 can be read ...

Any thoughts?

mjs schrieb am Donnerstag, 5. Oktober 2023 um 08:10:50 UTC+2:

[Wild Willy]

I am on Windows 7 64-bit, Firefox 115.3.1esr 64-bit, VDH 8.1.0.0a4 beta, CoApp 2.0.1.

As I write this, I am downloading something from this page:

https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/085367-001-A/costa-rica-der-natur-zur-seite-stehen/

It looks like what you can see in attached image #01. This is going to take a while
because I am not getting very good service from this web site, as you can see in attached
image #02. In that image #02, you'll note that something named ffmpeg.exe is downloading
at a rather poor speed of about 1.7 million bytes per second. That is VDH. I'm
downloading this using the new "side" download function. If you want to know more about
this, you need to be monitoring this forum more closely. In any case, I decided to post
now before my download has completed since it's going to take a while. If I don't come
back to post again, you can assume that all went well & I got the nature show from that
page. I will not watch it all the way through for 2 reasons. First, I don't want to
spend the time. Second, if it's in German, that's a language I don't speak. But I will
skim it to make sure it's all there, video & audio, right to the end, which I expect it
to be. Only if that turns out to not be the case will I post here again.

So get up to the latest VDH beta & the latest CoApp. So many problems are solved with
that that it is really a bad idea to stick with the configuration you have.

[Wild Willy]

The Costa Rica nature show turns out to be a weird case. The video I downloaded earlier
did complete successfully & played fine.

Without audio.

This is one of those separate video & audio cases. It seems this is not yet dealt with
in this latest beta release of the extension & the CoApp. We still get separate video &
audio.

Attached image #01 here shows the audio track after I've downloaded it. It's the last
entry on the VDH menu, the one with the Play icon. VDH recognized the video track as
being susceptible to a new "side" download. VDH did not similarly recognize the audio
track like that. When I played that audio track synchronously with my previously
downloaded video track in VLC, I found that as soon as I did a skip forward, the audio
track went mute. So I merged the video & audio, as shown in attached file Merge log.txt.
That played fine & I could skip around in it. There was audio throughout the show.

This one is a real multilingual party. The original audio is still faintly audible in
the background behind a dubbed German sound track. I think that original audio is
Spanish but I'm not sure. The credits are in German & French. And as luck would have
it, as I was sampling through this, I stumbled upon one person speaking English, although
I couldn't actually hear her because of the German dubbed sound track.

I thought with all these languages going on, surely there must be subtitles with this.
So I reloaded the web page, then opened the Network Monitor & scrolled through it looking
for captions. I didn't find anything. I did, of course, find an HLS master manifest
(attached image #02). Ffprobe on that gave me the results in attached file ffprobe.txt.
As you can see, there are 4 Programs 0-3 consisting of video Streams of various
resolutions, each sharing a common audio Stream (labelled, not surprisingly, as German).
Shared audio. The classic formula for triggering the VDH bug of recognizing video &
audio as being separate when they are not. But there are no captions mentioned in the
manifest.

So my advice about getting the new 8.1.0.0a4 beta of the VDH extension & the latest CoApp
2.0.1 still stands. But in addition, we are encountering the old VDH bug that has
apparently not yet been addressed, in which video & audio are being recognized
separately. You have to do 2 VDH downloads, one for the video, the other for the audio.
Or, you can use the HLS master manifest I found to just download the entire video in one
step, including its audio track, with ffmpeg. I didn't bother doing that but it's
obvious it is possible here. If you want to know how, search this forum for a thread
with the title, "VDH can't download it? Maybe ffmpeg can." It's a tutorial on how to use
ffmpeg.

I must add that there is some old activity in this forum that talks about problems on
ARTE. That was in connection with ARTE France but it's the same problem as this one
here. You really should learn to search this forum for answers before you post.

[Wild Willy]

No, I opened the Network Monitor, THEN reloaded the page. I do so wish we could edit our
posts here. But that was a far too useful feature that used to be available here so of
course Google deimplemented it.

[Wild Willy]

I fooled around a bit with the controls available in the player on the web page. I
thought this one control was for captions. But it turns out it's for swapping the audio
track from German to French. I imagine that caused a new HLS master manifest to appear
in the Network Monitor, & it probably shows the shared audio track labelled as French. I
didn't look for that to verify my guess.

[Ingo62]

Thanks a lot Willy!

I completely forgot that I can use the tool not only to download the individual video (and in case of ARTE also audio files) but can use it to merge them again, too.

Thus, I tried using iMovie (which is Apple MacOS only) which didn't recognize the 4k video and I had to use Handbrake to (p)reprocess it first.

With using the videodownload helper itself merging works fine. Still, MacOS doesn't recognize the MP4 as a valid format, but as long as VLC and PLEX can process it I don't care too much.

What remains is the anomaly that the audio is neither specifically highlighted being the audio file, and its size is incorrectly shown. For me it shows as 95.1 kB while the download results in 43MB. Not sure whether the download helper can be blamed for it, though.

Anyhow, thanks for spending time on my behalf, inded! 

I can confirm the latest beta to work for me with a 3 step process downloading video, audio, and merging them, only MacOS not recognizing the resulting file as MP4 :-)

Best regards

Ingo

[Paul Rouget]

Right. We are aware of this type of issue. Like I mentioned in another thread, we are unrolling a fix for HLS for now (need Coapp v2 + addon 8.1beta). I'm assuming that website doesn't use HLS, right?

[Wild Willy]

No Paul. It does use HLS. Upthread I posted the report I got from the ffprobe of the
HLS master manifest I found. The problem is that there's 4 video tracks sharing a single
audio track. VDH has never interpreted this structure of manifest correctly. It sees
this & assumes the video & audio are being offered separately. YouTube offers video &
audio separately. Other sites are simply offering more video tracks than audio. But
that's not separate tracks. That's just sharing. VDH is not interpreting the manifest
correctly. You might want to look at this thread as well:

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

[Paul Rouget]

Understood. That's useful feedback. I'll see why we don't process that properly.

[Tuas]

I tried to load this:
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/109846-000-A/zwangsarbeit-sos-aus-china/

Error:
GrabInfo: Cannot get info from https://arte-cmafhls.akamaized.net/am/cmaf/109000/109800/109846-000-A/231117165656/medias/109846-000-A_v1080.m3u8:Exit code: 1

Tested with Firefox & Chromium

VdhCoApp 2.0.10

[jcv...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I add it to the list of sites to be investigated.

Thanks for the feedback.

jerome