Problems downloading Digital Concert Hall videos with VDH 7.1.1

[jezzastern]

I am having problems downloading videos from the Digital Concert Hall site. I previously had no difficulty downloading from this site using Firefox 48 and Video Downloadhelper 6.3.1 on an old Macbook running Snow Leopard - these were downloaded as M2TS files. I am now using Firefox 57.02 and Video Downloadhelper 7.1.1 and the Companion App 1.1.0 under Windows 10. The files are detected and are now downloaded as HLS/MP4 files. However, at the end of downloading, I receive the following error message:

MP2T - No data received

moz-extension://d2a0f651-150b-4e65-a23c-3dac156c1a4c/background/main.js:1
value@moz-extension://d2a0f651-150b-4e65-a23c-3dac156c1a4c/background/main.js:1:189860
value@moz-extension://d2a0f651-150b-4e65-a23c-3dac156c1a4c/background/main.js:1:154039
value@moz-extension://d2a0f651-150b-4e65-a23c-3dac156c1a4c/background/main.js:1:79670
value/</e.endTimer<@moz-extension://d2a0f651-150b-4e65-a23c-3dac156c1a4c/background/main.js:1:153236

A typical video from this site, which can be downloaded for free, without subscribing is:

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/51059#watch:51059-2

I would be grateful if you could help to solve this problem for me.

[mig]

Can it be that your VDH settings have "Download HLS as MP2T" checked ? Can you check this in VDH Settings > Behaviour ?

[jezzastern]

Thank you. Yes - I realised that in VDH 7, I had "Download HLS as M2TS" unchecked, and this is when the error occurred. When I check this option, the download proceeds successfully as an M2TS file, which I can then quickly demux into an MP4 file losslessly.

[mig]

Thanks for the feedback. But VDH is supposed to work with the default options (that are to reconstruct a MP4 from HLS streams, not just concatenate MP2T chunks).
Your sample URL worked for me without the error at the end.

[jezzastern]

Thanks. Obviously it would be more convenient for me to have the files in MP4 format directly in VDH. I appreciate the fact that you can download the sample file without error. Could there be anything else in my configuration or elsewhere that would be causing the error that I am getting?

[mig]

Could there be anything else in my configuration or elsewhere that would be causing the error that I am getting?

I guess you made already made a pass on the settings and verified you did not have a non-default settings (it appears in orange).

I also assume the problem you have is consistent, i mean reproducible, as a one time network is something usual.

[jezzastern]

Thank you. I have tried downloading the sample and other files from the digital concert hall site using the default "behavior" settings (no options hightlighted in red), and consistently receive the "MP2T - No data received" error message. The only way that I can consistently download from this site is to tick the "download HLS as M2TS" option. Although this is not ideal, at least I can download the files that I want, although not in MP4 format. One last thing crosses my mind - does receiving HLS as MP4 require conversion? I have not yet purchased a conversion licence. I am happy to do this if it will solve the problem. Otherwise, I think that I will have to be satisfied receiving the files as M2TS format, and manually demuxing them.

Many thanks for your help.

[mig]

Registering the product is unlikely to change anything in that matter.

Do we agree you get the problem when trying to download the video from https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/51059#watch:51059-2 after clicking "Watch trailer" ?

Are you using a proxy ?

[jezzastern]

No - it is the interview (available for free) that I tried, not the trailer for the main work.

No proxies.

Thanks

[mig]

Oh cool. From this video https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/interview/51082-3 i can reproduce the problem.
So this should be fixed the next version, but this will be in 2018. Thanks for the details.

[jezzastern]

Thank you. I have now upgraded to the latest version 7.1.2, but the problem still persists. Hopefully it can be fixed soon.

Many thanks

[mig]

It seems that video, https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/interview/51082-3, contains DRMs. I'm afraid VDH cannot do anything here.

[jezzastern]

Thank you. But in that case, how can you explain that there is no problem downloading Digital Concert Hall files as M2TS, but only as MP4. And also, when trying to download as MP4, the file appears to download, and I only receive the "MP2T - No data received" error message at the end of the download. I would have thought that, if the problem related to Digital Rights Management, then M2TS downloads would not work, and MP4 downloads would not commence.

Thank you

[mig]

You are right, i missed that in the thread posts. If it plays when downloading as M2TS, it's definitely not a DRM problem.

For some reasons, VDH cannot recognize the actual M2TS data in the stream, so you are left with the 48 bytes file header. It is not an unknown encoding issue (which would produce the same symptoms) otherwise we would get an error message in the console. I haven't seen this case before.

I cannot commit to jump quickly into that issue as it is not frequent but fixing the problem from this video is definitely in the TODO list.

[jezzastern]

Thank you for your prompt reply. Hopefully this can be fixed in due course.

[mig]

That's definitely the kind of issue that prevents me from sleeping.

I dug into the problem, which appeared to be a mis-formed MP2T frame in every chunk preventing the other, well-formed, frames to be processed.

I pushed a new development version 7.1.3a13 fixing the problem: https://www.downloadhelper.net/firefox/betas

Can you give it a try ?

I'm not 100% satisfied though. The resulting file seems to lack the first few seconds (~6) of the video and i don't know where they are :/

[jezzastern]

Thanks. I've downloaded the Beta, and unchecked "Download HLS as M2TS". Now the Digital Concert Hall downloads download in MP4 format without error. HOWEVER, as you say, the beginning of the file is missing, AND ALSO there is a strange jerkiness whenever there is any movement in the movie (watched in Quicktime on MAC High Sierra, but the same problem also occurs on my old Snow Leopard machine), which makes it virtually unwatchable. Lip sync is all over the place due to the jerkiness - I presume that this must have something to do with the misformed MP2T frames. None of this occurs when the Digital Concert Hall stream is downloaded as M2TS (the beginning is there, and there is no jerkiness).

I hope this helps.

Thanks

[mig]

Jerkiness with Quicktime on HLS downloads is a long time known problem. There are 2 workarounds: use an other player than QuickTime, like VLS http://videolan.org/ or convert the resulting file (you can use automatic conversion rule or action Download & Convert) using an output format like "re-encoded MP4 (h264/aac)".

[Grasshopper297]

I found the same problem when I tried to download a video from 10 Play using the Firefox VDH Addon. However I found a solution.

I used an alternate piece of software called YouTube-Dl. Website - http://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/

Using the VDH addon I found that I was getting some videos with no sound. So I clicked on the video downloader help icon, then the arrow and then the details to get information about the video.

I noticed that the video was being downloaded using the URL at the bottom of the page. However there is also a URL in the "masterManifest".

Using this URL I copy and pasted this into the YouTube-dl and presto.. Video with Sound.

I hope this information is useful.

[Ricardo Bonet]

I'm having the very same issue. Sometimes, by reloading the page or the app, it allows you choose just one quality and it seems to be the best one. The rest of the times I just get 48kb files after a whole download, or video files that seem corrupt. I've noticed as well that sometimes the web page doesn't give me the choice to choose the video quality, the icon at the lower right corner is no there. I've tried withe 7.1.3a13, but it's all tha same. It all started two days ago, previous to that everything was fine.

Thanks a lot for your interest.