I can´t see the video, only the audio is heard

[Iulian Tenica]

Hello, 

The program doesn't work lately. The files are downloaded in .avi or .mp4 format but only the audio is heard, the image is static, the video is not seen. I have paid for a license and have always used it with Firefox. I don't understand why it doesn't work as before with the same Firefox? I need help

[FACJR]

I have the same problem except in Chrome. This was never an issue before.

How do we resolve this? 

[Rocket Bunisses]

tURMA,QUANDO VOU VER A PREVIA DO VIDEO SÓ APARECE O VIDEO E NÃO SAI O AÚDIO,É NORMAL? ASSIM QUE PAGAR A LICENÇA FICA NORMAL?

[Wild Willy]

Have you tried using the search key "video without audio" to search this forum?

[Pablo Diaz]

same problem here,  when the download is finished and i play the video, the image advances but the audio stays, then the image freezes but the audio keeps playing

[mjs]

Do any of you have a url to the video to find out what the problem is ?

The problem will go unresolved otherwise if there is no video to look at.

[Pablo Diaz]

https://youtu.be/Y_Q3W75KRgI

This is the problem that i have.

[mjs]

I see that the video is going very fast at the start then it is the audio. Do you remember what video resolution it was downloaded at ?

I suggest to try every video resolution that vdh lists for this video, then come back to post your results on what works and what doesn't work.

That is a suggestion for all the others who posted their issue too. It would have been better to see the actual video to try myself but l suppose

it's not a public video.

[Wild Willy]

Geez, man. A three and a half hour video? You couldn't find something shorter? Oh
well. It is what it is. I went to the page & there was nothing in the VDH menu that
looked like this video. So I changed the resolution to 1920x1080 @ 60fps. That made a
variant of 1920x1080 appear on the VDH menu but it said it was only 25 seconds long &
only 165.6M. No way that's a 3.5 hour video. But we've had one instance recently of a
web page reporting an item being only a few seconds long & it turned out to be a much
longer video once you went ahead & clicked on the thing in the VDH menu anyway. So
guessing that I was seeing the same thing here, I went ahead & launched the download of
this thing. YouTube's typical throttling means that I was fully aware that I was going
to have to be patient for something on the order of 1 hour & 45 minutes. This is a basic
rule of thumb that applies to YouTube content. Whatever it is, expect YouTube to
artificially adjust whatever download speed you get to make the download last about half
the duration of the video. This is just an estimate. It so happened that I had
something else downloading at the same time, and I was more interested in watching
something I had downloaded earlier. So I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to how long
it took. It most definitely took way longer than you'd expect of a 25-second video. I
wasn't paying close attention, but during the last 5% or so of the download, Resource
Monitor was telling me this was downloading at a speed of about 25,000 bytes per second.
That is utterly disgusting. That's no better than a dial-up modem. YouTube is shameful.

In any case, after a couple of hours, I had a video of size 165M, duration 3:36:07,
1920x1080, 60fps. I'm a bit surprised by the file size. Maybe that's an artifact of the
video being ridiculously sped up. This is a problem I first started encountering over a
year ago. You can read about it here:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/w9993gUmxr4

I have offered some advice there on how to repair the video. I have pointed people to
that thread before but nobody has responded whether any of that helped. I would so love
to hear from somebody who tried what I describe over there. I did not try that on this
video. I am not sufficiently interested in its content & I don't feel like spending the
time. It is a video you wanted so I'm hoping you are willing to spend the time to learn
what I explained & to perform the repair I suggested. Meanwhile, perhaps mjs's advice
will give you easier results. Otherwise, you'll have to try my suggestion. Or just give
up.

[Frederick Charles]

I have tried this for my videos and the lower resolutions don't resolve the problem. I get the same result but if it did work the quality of the content wouldn't be worth it. 

You're spot on about the videos not being public, they are university videos from Vimeo. If I tried sharing the link I don't believe you would be able to access the videos but I'll post the link below anyway. 

https://canvas.e-zigurat.com/courses/2007/pages/m9-u3-%7C-live-session-1

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[Wild Willy]

Yeah, it prompts for a user ID & password. But you can still try some of the things that
have been suggested here & in numerous other threads in this forum. You need to put some
effort into helping yourself because none of us can do it for you. But this business of
video without audio & audio without video is common. It's common around the web. And
we've offered the advice you need to deal with it in numerous other threads you can find
easily by just looking for them. You might shorten your search by starting here:

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

You won't read very far in there before you come across a discussion with references
dealing with this issue.

Now, our pal Pablo Diaz actually reported a different problem above. He is not seeing
video without audio & audio without video. He is seeing a damaged video, in which the
video & the audio do not play at the same speed. The solution to that is rather
intricate & I gave a reference that points you off to where you can find a solution to
that one.

What we need to hear from you now is that yes, I found the variant on my menu that is
video without audio. I found the variant that is audio without video. I downloaded each
one separately & now I can watch my video with its audio no problem. That's what we need
to hear from you. There have been multiple solutions offered here. You need to look
beyond the easy solution that didn't work & try the harder solution that will work. If
you are having trouble identifying which variants on your password protected site are
video without audio & audio without video, post some screenshots showing the VDH menus.
Maybe one of us will be able to point out the ones you need to download.

[mjs]

There is a way to download private Vimeo videos without vdh. This tutorial may work for chrome, not sure about Firefox.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CQu4IUMPqxA

Here is another tutorial done in chrome, l've used this method but in Firefox it is slightly different. You first have to expand script then right click

edit html. Then it will let you copy everything inside with Firefox.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CDomGOjyisY

Try these tutorials and see if it works for you.

[Wild Willy]

I watched those 2 videos & tried to follow what he was doing. I used as my example the
Vimeo video I found in this thread the other day:

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

Back to the story. I opened the Network Monitor & filtered on player.vimeo.com. I got 3
results listed in the Network Monitor so I just picked the first one. The file you get
when you save that entry is a json. When I looked inside it, I wasn't finding MP4 URLs
like he said. Json follows a particularly ugly format with no line breaks if you look at
it in Notepad, as he shows in his videos. Fortunately, I have Notepad++ which
automatically prettifies json. It helped a tiny bit. It organized some parts of the
content but there were still large chunks that were just run-on lines.

But I did notice there were several mentions of master.m3u8. Now that's something I can
deal with. I think I counted 14 URLs of master manifests in there. I just started with
the first URL & pumped each one I found through ffprobe. The first 2 got all manner of
errors from ffprobe, 404 not found mostly. But I hit paydirt with the third one. It
showed the usual array of Programs & Streams that you expect to see in an ffprobe report.
I settled on the 1920x1080 video (happened to be Stream 0:4). It was paired in the same
Program with an audio stream (Stream 0:1).

In addition, the ffprobe report showed the usual error message about not being able to
support the subtitles. My experience is that this is hogwash. Ffmpeg is easily able to
download subtitles. Captions. They're synonyms. The error message gave a partial URL
for a manifest for subtitles. I took the beginning part of the URL for the master
manifest & prepended it to the partial URL for the subtitles manifest in the ffprobe
report. I ran that through ffmpeg. Presto. I got a .vtt file of English subtitles.

Getting the video was more of a struggle. I was doing everything like I always do but
ffmpeg was telling me I was making a syntax error. For the life of me, I couldn't figure
out what I was doing wrong. I kept studying my input & I finally noticed that the URL of
the master manifest ended with a \ character. I went back to the raw json & double
checked that I had faithfully copied the URL. Sure enough, in the json, the URL ends
with \. The URL is surrounded by " " in the json & the \ is inside the quotation marks.
But we've seen enough URLs to know that the usual character for separating sections of a
URL is /, not \. So I took a wild-ass guess & removed the \ from the end of the URL for
the master manifest. Poof. Magic. No more complaints from ffmpeg. It downloaded the
15-minute video with audio.

Next step was to play the thing in VLC & see what the subtitles looked like. I am
guessing these subtitles were machine generated from the audio track. At least half of
them simply didn't match the dialog in the scene. There were also stretches when there
was dialog but there were no subtitles. I would call these subtitles far below standard,
extremely poor. In addition, the main character is constantly on his cell phone back to
his home country, which the text below the video says is Pakistan. During his phone
calls home, there are burned-in English subtitles displayed with other subtitles coming
from the vtt file overlaying them intermittently. It's quite a mess. Setting the
subtitle issues aside, the video did play perfectly beginning to end.

But this is all moot. As I demonstrated in that thread from the other day, this video
downloads fine with VDH. The only perhaps useful thing Vid Down Madness has added is a
way to discover captions & download them, even if they are garbage. Maybe there is
content on Vimeo for which the captions aren't garbage, but they were most assuredly
garbage for this video. There is a CC button in the Vimeo player for this particular
video that lets you turn English captions on. It also says there that they are machine
generated, confirming my suspicion I voiced above. VDH, as we all know, does not handle
captions. But using ffprobe on the master HLS manifest you can find (eventually) in the
json will reveal not simply the various resolutions of the video, with a couple of
qualities of audio, but you can also find captions. I will give Vid Down Madness the
benefit of the doubt that he found some videos that worked the way he described. But I
think there is no consistency on Vimeo, just as there is no consistency on YouTube, so
his technique is not a generally applicable one. You probably have to look at each json
as its own case & improvise what to do with it. Vimeo is owned by YouTube, isn't it? Or
is it just that both YouTube & Vimeo are owned by Google? In any case, it's sure a lot
of fun for those of us who have unlimited time to geek out with this stuff. But it seems
like every case needs its own hand-crafted solution. For people who don't have this sort
of time to burn, the situation is probably quite hopeless.

[mjs]

I don't think those methods are meant for videos on the Vimeo website itself but for private Vimeo videos embedded on other sites.

I've used the method in the second video and it works. I'm not sure if the method in the other video works in Firefox because they did it

in chrome.

[mjs]

Both of those tutorials work but they are done a slightly differently in Firefox compared to chrome. I made a test embed if you want to try it out

again. It's not private but it an embed.

https://sites.google.com/view/vimeotestembed/home

[Wild Willy]

Thanks for that. I went to that page & got VDH to show me a handful of variants of
various resolutions. Note, the variants did quote resolutions, leading one to believe
there would be video. The variant downloaded quickly but it turned out to be audio only.
In light of all of the above, I suppose that is not a surprise.

So I went to the alternative method. The player.vimeo.com object was an HTML document.
Double clicking it just opened a new tab with the video in it with larger dimensions than
what you see on your embed page. That filter key must be something that works only
directly on the Vimeo web site. But there was something that showed up when I filtered
on just player. It was player.js, not a json. But I copied that to my system as a json
& went through the same exercise as yesterday. Once again, it was the third master
manifest I found in there that gave me useful information. Ffprobe on that third master
manifest listed 5 Programs numbered 0 through 4. Among the 5 programs, Stream 0:0 was
audio at 128kb/s & Stream 0:1 was audio at 256kb/s. Stream 0:0 was part of 3 of the
Programs & Stream 0:1 was part of the 2 other Programs. In other words, the 2 audio
Streams were shared out among the 5 Programs. The 5 video Streams, numbered 0:2 through
0:6, showed various video resolutions. The 1920x1080 video happened to be Stream 0:4.
It was paired with audio Stream 0:1 in Program 2. Those were the 2 Streams I selected
via -map parameters for download with ffmpeg. There were no subtitles in evidence. The
download took 33 seconds, which works out to an average download speed of almost 4.3
million bytes per second. My observation of Resource Monitor showed the speed
oscillating around 5 million BPS, but there's always ramp-up & ramp-down effects so the
average speed was a touch lower. That gave me an MP4 of size 135M, resolution 1920x1080,
decent video bit rates in the 5500kbps range, frame rate 25fps, audio sampling rate
48kHz, audio bit rate 253kbps. It's curious that ffprobe ahead of time claimed the audio
would be 256kbps but after the download, it was 253kbps. That's an insignificant
difference. It's also the sort of minor variation that I observe with almost all my
downloads.

It's no surprise it played fine in VLC. There was one spot where the screen went black
for a moment. Normally, I see that happen when something else on my system uses enough
CPU to momentarily intrude on the VLC processing. Rewinding a few seconds & replaying
the passage usually shows the video did not actually include a black screen. But it
seems there was a momentary black spot recorded in this video. I'm not a skier but I
think that guy would have to be at the very highest expert level. That did not look like
terrain reserved for a ski resort. I found it interesting how he kept setting off
mini-avalanches behind him. That could be a concern under some circumstances, I suppose,
but I guess he knew what he was doing. I assume this was filmed from a drone remotely
controlled by the small team named in the credits. That would mean the audio was not
captured by the drone flying at some hundreds of feet above. I would imagine that the
skier was miked & they mixed the audio with the video during editing.

One thing is a bit curious. VDH claims that this is a DASH stream. But the json
includes HLS manifests. The json does include some occurrences of the string mpd that
look like they might be DASH manifests, but they are all in partial URLs. The m3u8
strings occur in complete URLs. That seems like more work than is worth it to try to get
mpd DASH manifests when the m3u8 HLS manifest URLs are right there for copying & pasting.
As long as you chop off the pesky \ that always appears at the end.

Anyway, I suppose this exercise works as a proof of concept. You can get embedded Vimeo
content with a bit of tinkering. There are many occurrences of the string mp4 in the
json, some of them within URLs. But it seems to me that it is too complex to look for
the mp4 URLs yourself & try to manually correlate them with a resolution, as Vid Down
Madness recommends in his video tutorials. It seems far simpler & more reliable to hunt
for a manifest that lets ffprobe do the heavy lifting. Then ffmpeg can rely on that.

[Wild Willy]

I meant to mention that the duration of the video was 00:03:21.

[mjs]

Ok forget about using the first tutorial try the second tutorial. The object of the test is not to get a manifest but an mp4 url which can be

opened in a new tab. Why is it done like this ?

Because the other user FACJR said they are trying to download private embedded videos from Vimeo. I believe that the manifest that vdh is

downloading the video from has an issue. Maybe there is some corruption or some other problem. So by bypassing the manifest and getting

a url to an mp4 video it may get around that corruption.

[Wild Willy]

I'm burned out with this problem. I'm not downloading anything more here.

I wasn't looking for it but I stumbled across Michel's comment about 2 types of DASH
streaming:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/yj0X6iZxBVo/m/jqU_cjO5EAAJ

What I'm observing is that the HLS manifest is not at all corrupt. It's simply not being
presented. You have to rummage around in the json to find it. If VDH properly supported
this style of DASH content, which Michel has acknowledged in that post that VDH does not
support it, I'm not sure VDH would even use the HLS manifest I found. If this is truly a
DASH stream, VDH would find a DASH manifest, mpd file. Like I said earlier, I believe I
found things in this json that might have been information for locating several mpd DASH
manifests. But the URLs are only partial. I'm assuming that once Michel adds support
for DASH to VDH, it will handle these URLs that I simply don't have the energy to figure
out. This json thing appears to be a wrapper that goes around m3u8 HLS manifests & mpd
DASH manifests, both types within the same json, and several of each type. Vimeo
apparently knows how to unwrap the information. I can't tell whether Vimeo unwraps an
HLS manifest or a DASH manifest when you click the Play button in a web page. It must be
unwrapping one or the other. But there's a choice in each case. Which one does it
choose? When VDH supports DASH properly, I would speculate that it would unwrap a DASH
manifest & ignore all HLS manifests in there. A DASH manifest. Which one? I believe I
saw information that points to multiple DASH manifests. I definitely saw information
pointing to multiple HLS manifests. I just stopped on the first one I found that ffprobe
liked. I didn't investigate the dozen more that were further down in the json. I just
did a find on them & counted them. I don't pretend to understand json. I don't know why
there would be multiple manifests. After all, one manifest is all you need in order to
give pointers to manifests for multiple resolutions of a video. So why are there
multiple HLS manifests in this json? For that matter, why are there multiple DASH
manifests in this json? I don't know. So I don't know what VDH would do with this.

[mjs]

Apparently vdh will only download dash streams from Vimeo when there are also HLS manifests that the video could be downloaded from.

Maybe it is a problem of the dash manifests. Youtube-dl gives you the option to choose. Take a look at the log file I saved

for this video : https://vimeo.com/377541992

In addition to the dash and HLS formats there some marked as http , those are what you would call simple mp4 downloads.

[Pablo Diaz]

Please try the other browsers and also different formats wmv, mp4, etc. The same problem keeps happening, this happened to me when I bought the license, since I had previously downloaded some videos and I had no problem. I download the videos from a private platform of a university. The truth is that I regret having bought the license because it is not working for me

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[User]

Hi, this worked for me " https://youtube.com/watch?v=CQu4IUMPqxA ". Thank you. Hopefully vimeo will get fixed in vdh.

[mjs]

I do not think having a license has any connection to this problem. It's still going to be the same result without one,the difference being it will add a watermark. What I suspect is that the dash manifest that VDH gets the download from is damaged or corrupted. I could be guessing though.

That's why I posted some tutorials I found on YouTube, and at least one user here has reported it works. This discussion is also an example on how not to post your issue. Don't say I have a problem ,its not working , or I have the same problem. Provide the website and a link to the video , only one person did that even though it was behind a login.

I have a more in depth post to work around this problem, read more and learn to use it :

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

[Wild Willy]

I saw this thread was updated again & I thought I was already finished with this. I have
to agree wholeheartedly with everything mjs has just said.

But it occurred to me that I had not done the most basic thing. I felt stupid for not
having done it in the first place. I visited Pablo's too-fast video page on YouTube
again & actually pressed the Play button. I hadn't done that before. When you play the
video on YouTube, it plays too fast. I checked every resolution available. It plays too
fast at every resolution. The only possible conclusion is that the source material is
damaged. Downloading it with VDH isn't going to fix that. It's just going to faithfully
copy what's there, damage & all. It's damaged at source. The video itself is damaged.
Have you got the message yet that this video is damaged? There is the possibility that
my dual VLC windows trick will allow you to watch this at a speed that resembles reality.
But it's up to you to figure out what speed will make it play properly.

You have reported NO bug in VDH here. VDH works perfectly to download this video
correctly as it exists on YouTube. Case closed.