audio DRIFTS out of sync with video on long (2 hr.+) downloads?

[williemyers]

hey guys, I've had this evber since I started using VDH, but on my longer downloads (2.5+ hours, feature length films, etc.) audio will always drift slowly behind the picture. I think it 's a progressive problem and is probably drifting on shorter videos as well, just not so noticiable.
BTW, I'm using a MacBook Pro/Mojave and VDH 7.6.6 on Firefox 112.0.2
your thoughts?

[Wild Willy]

There have been other reports of this problem on here. You should hunt them up.

[williemyers]

thanks for your response. I've found a lot of info/threads about audio being out of sync with pix, but my issue is having the audio drift.

[jcv...@gmail.com]

hi,

one thing you can try is to convert it to another format.

If you have a public link to a video that reproduces the problem, please share it.

jerome

[williemyers]

hey Jerome, thanks for reply. here's a long one (about 3.5 hours) that drifts pretty bacdly by about the end of teh seond hour.

https://fmoviesto.cc/movie/jfk-1991-full-17786

[Wild Willy]

I went to your movie page. Initially, there was nothing on the VDH menu. But I was
getting these popups notifying me that "Anna" had sent me pictures of herself.
Fortunately, the popups included a dismiss button that actually dismissed the popups.
They kept appearing, so the dismiss is good for only one dismissal. These types of web
sites are SO annoying. I eventually managed to actually click the play button in the
video player. Did that launch playback? Of course not. It kept opening new web pages
of . . . I don't know what. Probably advertising. I closed them before the completed
loading. At least a dozen times. Eventually, since I'm a persistent sort of git, the
play button actually functioned to launch playback. Sort of. It actually didn't launch
playback. It gave me another popup on top of the movie that I suppose I would have to
dismiss if I wanted to actually sit there & watch the movie on their site.

Fortunately, at this point, VDH actually recognized something, as you can see in the
attached image #01. I cascaded out the secondary VDH menu for the first variant &
selected Details, as you can see in attached image #02. That gave me the standard VDH
Hit Details page. The one bit of information I wanted is what you can see in attached
image #03. I gave that URL to ffprobe, as you can see in attached text file ffprobe.txt.
You'll note that ffprobe has detected the hated timed_ID3 data in this content. This is
something that we have encountered numerous times before. You can search this forum with
"timed_ID3" as your search key & find plenty of mentions of it. This success of ffprobe
meant that I should be able to get this with ffmpeg.

That's exactly what I did. You can learn all about what I did by first clicking this:

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

Be sure you carefully read the first 2 paragraphs there. Once you have read that, you
can check out the references within that web page that I am about to give you. But don't
just find the relevant link & click it. READ the context around the link.

Next, look for "stealth quote" within the text of that web page. That will give you
another link to click. Click that, read what you find, & follow the advice, not just for
your posts in this thread, not just for your posts in this forum, but for your posts
anywhere on Google Groups.

Next, look for "short tutorial" within the text of that web page. That explains why your
response here will use the Reply all button. It also explains why you will NOT use the
Reply to author button.

Next, look for "cannot download" within the text of that web page. That will give a link
to a tutorial on how to use ffmpeg. Once you read that, and you should read all of that,
you will understand the results I have posted as JFKmp4.txt. If you look carefully at
the contents of that attached file, you'll notice that the file into which I wrote these
results was named JFKmp4.log. But Google doesn't accept just any old file extension in
the names of attachments. So I had to rename the file as .txt. The main idea of the
download with ffmpeg is that you can avoid the timed_ID3 data, which is almost certainly
the cause of your audio drift. Look carefully in that attached log file & you will find
the ffmpeg command I executed, the size of the resulting file, & the duration & the
average speed of the download. That speed is not too terrible. Not as good as some
sites I deal with, but way way WAY better than YouTube. A download of 15 minutes for a
movie that's over 3 hours long? I'll take that any day. I'm showing the results of the
download in attached image #04. The file properties predict that the movie will play
fine, althogh the video bit rates are rather pitifully low. But that's probably the best
you can expect from a site that gives you free movies. I sometimes marvel that such
sites are allowed to exist. Don't the copyright owners object to this sort of thing? Or
do they share in the advertising revenue? Whatever.

The movie I downloaded appeared to be intact. I didn't sit & watch it, just skimmed it,
sampling it at intervals. Every place I looked at, early, middle, late, looked like the
audio was perfectly in synch with the video. The reported duration of 3:21:00 makes it
cut off in the middle of the closing credits. Rather strange, but I suppose beggars
can't be choosers.

This problem is pretty much a duplicate of this old thread:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/zJYAprBWk6k

That is one you would have found in your search of this forum using "sync" as your search
key. The problem reported there is just about the exact same thing you are reporting
here. That should have jumped out at you had you read that. You would have also
discovered that the solution I offered there is the same one I've offered here. If you
want to get audio that is in synch with video on this movie, you'll abandon VDH in favor
of ffmpeg. This might be true of other content on this site. I'll leave that to you to
figure out.

[jcv...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I downloaded this one, I had no sync problem.

jerome

[Wild Willy]

Interesting. You're showing a duration on the VDH menu. My VDH menu did not. Not only
that, but your VDH menu is showing the duration at about one and a half hours less than
what I downloaded. Did your download include the closing credits, even if they were cut
off?

[jcv...@gmail.com]

You're right, I didn't notice I didn't get the complete movie.

I tried again, I checked in the proposed entry that the length of the movie was OK.

It stopped 2:18:06

If I reload the page I have the entry with the correct length.

So strange, even the resolution of the incomplete movie is not what I asked...

Michel is having a look.

[mjs]

I hope williemyers that you got the hint on what to do based on the images posted by Jerome. Have you tried doing what Jerome did ?

What are your results of this issue  ?