DW helper not working on sites like PBS

[AudioWave Dasher 2]

Im looking to download programs like nova, nature, and frontline. I like to see the latest and these are supposedly free channels. The download helper downloads them but its not watchable usually with audio or video issues, like it will download the video but no audio. Its confusing when they give you like 10 links to download. Thanks

[mjs]

Can you share video urls of some examples for others to try and post some screenshots of what you see, they may be separating the audio and video.

--

A vdh user

[Wild Willy]

I am running Windows 7 64-bit, Firefox 103.0.2 64-bit, licensed VDH 7.6.3a1 beta, CoApp 1.6.3.

That's how you're supposed to start a proper problem report.  Tell us what you are running.  Be sure you include that information in every problem report you post.  Be sure you include that in the next post you add to this thread.

I went to the Nature show page & picked the first episode listed there:

https://www.pbs.org/video/dogs-in-the-land-of-lions-dvpy8r/

That's another thing you should include in any problem report: at least one URL of a web page on which a video resides.  Don't make it hard for people who are willing to help you.  Make it easy.  Post a sample URL.

When I went there, VDH offered me this without my even having to launch playback:

Of course, I downloaded the first variant on the VDH menu.  VDH always lists the available variants in descending order of resolution.  If you happen to see a web page on which VDH offers multiple variants of any given resolution, they are listed in descending order of quality.  Note that.  Quality within resolution.  Quality & resolution are NOT synonyms.  On this particular page, each resolution appears in a variant only once.  But you should remember what I've just mentioned for future reference.  Windows Resource Monitor showed I was getting download service on the order of 2-3 million bytes per second.  It fluctuated, sometimes going  higher, but mostly it was in that range.  That's a pretty decent speed compared to other sites, especially YouTube, which totally sucks.  VDH notified me of a successful download after about 16 minutes.  I had an MP4 of size 2,648,927,420 bytes (2.46G).  Doing the arithmetic, that works out to an average download speed of a little under 2.8 million bytes per second, reinforcing my observation of what Resource Monitor was reporting.  The properties of the file were these:

Those video bit rates are a bit high, which led me to expect pretty good quality video.  The audio bit rate is just kind of meh.  But then, Nature isn't a classical music show so it's good enough.  An important point is that this had both video & audio.  The video & audio were not separate for this show.

You'll notice the resolution is a bit weird.  I have been noticing this lately with my VDH downloads.  Those numbers are bogus.  Both ffprobe & VLC report the resolution as 1920x1080 so I don't know what's going on with that.  Maybe it's a quirk of Windows 7.  I don't pay it a whole lot of attention.  The important thing is the file played flawlessly in VLC, with both video & audio from the beginning to the end, including the end credits.  As predicted by the video properties, the video image was particularly sharp.  The audio was acceptable.

I don't know what to tell you.  Maybe you need to update your version of VDH or the CoApp or both.  Maybe you need to switch to Firefox if that's not the browser you're using.  Maybe you need to switch to VLC if that's not the playback tool you're using.  So many maybes because you didn't post a proper problem report.  Whatever the case, this works fine for me.

I have a couple of images in this post.  When you add your post to this thread, which you will do via Reply all, NOT Reply to author, you will need to take an extra step before you even begin typing.  When you open the Reply all dialog, it looks like the text entry box is empty.  It's not.  Scroll it down.  You'll see a ... marker.  Click the ... marker.  I'll bet you didn't even know that was there.  Most people on here don't seem to know.  But you'll see that Google has stealth quoted in not only my text but my images as well.  If you do nothing, all that useless bloat will end up in your post.  Worse, the Google bots might censor your post because there will be a lot more quoted material than what you add.  So just highlight the stealth quote & delete it all.  Once the text entry box is truly empty, you can begin writing your reply.  You need to learn to discipline yourself to delete the stealth quote in ALL your posts in ANY thread in this forum, not just in this thread.

I look forward to hearing from you.

[Wild Willy]

I decided to revisit this to see if I could get this with ffmpeg.  To understand what I did, take a look at this:

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

You'll probably want to bookmark that for easy reference.  You'll want to read that entire thread, if not now, eventually.  As you read through that thread, you'll come across 2 references to how to post a proper problem report.  But I already showed you upthread here how to do that so that's not so important now.  Another reference in there gives a complete tutorial on how to use ffmpeg.  You can skip directly to the relevant reference by doing a string search on "cannot download" in there.  That will reposition the web page on the relevant reference.  Click the link that gives you & you'll find a complete explanation of what I'm showing in the rest of this post.

One thing I must correct.  I didn't notice it yesterday but there are 2 variants in the VDH menu for resolution 1280x720.  The first one, the one with the 5.1Mbps indication, is the higher quality one.  The second one, the one with the 3.5Mbps indication, is the lower quality one.  Same 1280x720 resolution, 2 different quality levels.  If you download both of those, you will see the difference in quality reflected in the video properties, specifically the bit rates, of your 2 downloaded MP4s.  I'll leave that to you as an exercise.

Back to ffmpeg.  As usual, I looked for a master manifest.  The usual practice on most web sites is for the first .m3u8 listed to be the master manifest.

Running ffprobe on the first manifest highlighted in that image showed that it was indeed the master manifest.  I have attached the output of that ffprobe execution to this post.  It describes 8 Programs, matching the 8 variants in the VDH menu.  VDH analyzes the manifest, same as ffprobe does.  You'll note that each of the 8 Programs found by ffprobe consists of one video Stream followed by one audio Stream.  Each video Stream shows a resolution.  You'll note that the resolutions listed by ffprobe are the same ones listed by VDH, which is entirely to be expected.  You'll also note that the order of those resolutions in the ffprobe report is not the same as what you see on the VDH menu.  Like I said, VDH sorts the resolutions in descending order.  Since I mentioned 1280x720, you'll see those 2 variants in the ffprobe report as Program 2 & Program 3.  Within the ffprobe report for Program 2, you'll see the indication variant_bitrate : 5095219, and within Program 3 you'll see variant_bitrate : 3490552.  These match up with the 2 variants for those Programs on the VDH menu.  This is not surprising.  VDH gets this information from the manifest, same as ffprobe does.  You would do well to retrieve the manifest itself & look inside it with Notepad or whatever text editor you are using.  It is an educational exercise.  I'll leave that for you to do at your leisure.

Looking carefully at the ffprobe report, I settled on Program 1 as the one I wanted.  This consists of video Stream 0:2 & audio Stream 0:3.  Accordingly, I executed this ffmpeg command:

"G:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg-2022-03-17-git-242c07982a-full_build\bin\ffmpeg.exe" -hwaccel auto -protocol_whitelist file,crypto,data,http,https,tls,tcp -i "https://ga.video.cdn.pbs.org/videos/nature/7e61c729-5933-4376-897e-849fe10c8a75/2000070523/hd-16x9-mezzanine-1080p/lxsloze9_naat3605-16x9-1080p_983.m3u8" -codec: copy  -map 0:2  -map 0:3 "Q:\VDH Testing\Nature.mp4"  1>"Q:\VDH Testing\Naturemp4.Err" 2>"Q:\VDH Testing\Naturemp4.Log"

Google has folded & wrapped that to fit here on the web page.  But it is actually a single command line with no line breaks.

This downloaded the same video that I downloaded upthread using VDH.  This time it showed the correct resolution of 1920x1080, unlike the weird 1912x1088 that VDH generated.  The bit rates & other properties were the same.  The size was once again, unsurprisingly, 2.46G.  Surprisingly, this download completed in about 6 minutes.  I wasn't paying attention to what Resource Monitor was telling me for this download.  But the table napkin calculation gives an average download speed for this ffmpeg download of just under 7.4 million bytes per second.  I have no idea why this download went so much faster.  Maybe it's a function of the demand on the PBS web site now compared to when I did the download with VDH.  It's just an interesting observation.  Well, it's interesting to me, anyway.  It doesn't particularly affect the results of the downloads.

I noticed in the ffprobe report an error message about subtitles.  I have found that ffprobe always fails to properly handle whatever captions might be present.  (Captions.  Subtitles.  They're synonyms.)  I have no idea why it gives this error.  Ffmpeg is always able to download subtitles if they are present.  You just have to find them.  To find them, I told the Network Monitor to filter for captions:

This turned up what I expected.  I then downloaded those with ffmpeg:

"G:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg-2022-03-17-git-242c07982a-full_build\bin\ffmpeg.exe" -hwaccel auto -protocol_whitelist file,crypto,data,http,https,tls,tcp -i "https://ga.video.cdn.pbs.org/captions/nature/7e61c729-5933-4376-897e-849fe10c8a75/captions/hENYtj_caption.vtt" "Q:\VDH Testing\Nature.vtt"  1>"Q:\VDH Testing\Naturevtt.Err" 2>"Q:\VDH Testing\Naturevtt.Log"

You can see in my ffmpeg commands that I named my output video file Nature.mp4 & my captions Nature.vtt.  This allows VLC to automatically display the captions during playback: