Extension Crashes Silently With Companion App

[Umair Ahmed]

I have been using your companion app for HLS stream capture from numerous sites (except youtube).

Problem Type: Crash

Occurrence: Always.

Specific Steps To Reproduce:

1. Keep downloading HLS streams for 1-2 hours. The problem is stream website agnostic.
   
2. Don't download more than 3 streams simultaneously.
3. The captures should be big, around a gigabyte in size.
   

Exacerbating Actions:

• When with 4 simultaneous captures, it is certain that it is gonna die when one of them completes.
• For 5+, it simply dies in minutes or on spot when the fifth is added.

Behavior After Problem Occurrence:

• No error message is shown for anything that had went wrong.
  
• Sometimes all the open tabs, also crash.
  
• It stops capturing any videos on current or new tabs.
  
• Shows none of the stream captures before the crash in the main interface.
  
• Though the blue balloon remains stuck to the icon showing the number of captures in progress as before the crash.
  
• It does not recover for a new tab either so I have to restart the browser and manually one by one start the downloads yet again.
  

Computer specs:

• Mozilla Firefox v61.0
• Windows 10 64-bit (latest)
• Intel Core i5 6600
• 16GB RAM
• Nvidia 1060 3GB
• 256GB SSD

Other Extensions Installed:

1. AdBlock Plus
2. Dark Reader
3. Download Manager S3
4. Firefox Multi-Account Containers
   
5. Greasemonkey
6. Mega
7. Multithreaded Download Manager
8. Panel View for Google Translate
9. uMatrix
10. YouTube Audio and Video Downloader
    

[mig]

Can you share URLs to big HLS streams ?

[Umair Ahmed]

It also happens to small HLS streams too like it just crashed a minute ago with about 3x 50-100MB ones. This time though, it also crashed the browser.

I recently downloaded the following big ones with many small ones (A crashed occurred in the middle once):
High School DXD seasons 1-2 compilation - XVIDEOS.COM

Sin - Nanatsu no Taizai compilation - XVIDEOS.COM

[mig]

Thanks.

I'm currently downloading 6  big (> 1 hour) xvideos.com files in their highest resolution. It's gonna take a while. I'll come back to you with the result.

In the meantime, if anyone else can also run this test, this would be helpful.

[mig]

Also Umair Ahmed, can you go to the VDH settings, and decrease parameter "Concurrent chunk downloads" from default 4 to 2 ? If it is a problem of missing memory, one could expect that fetching less video chunk downloads in parallel will use less resources.

[mig]

I went through the 6 downloads without problem.

I have a powerful machine, memory-wise, with 128GB, and it may be possible that your computer reaches some limit. Even if your configuration is quite reasonable with 16GB, there may be other programs or extensions taking a substantial part of the RAM, leaving VDH with little memory to do the job.

I recommend decreasing parameter "Max concurrent downloads" to 2. This way if you request more downloads than your computer is able to table the additional downloads will be queued waiting for previous ones to complete.

[Umair Ahmed]

I think, RAM is not an issue because in idle state with about ~50 tabs open with videos, it consumes about 2.4GB of RAM. Through process explorer, I had seen that Firefox (64-bit) crashes well before reaching 5GB of memory allocated.

I will try with reduced concurrent chunks setting. But the next time, I would be doing this again, might be after a week or so.

The queue system though doesn't have much use for me as these sites expire the links to the videos quickly so I end up with unusable links. I had experienced the crash many times yesterday and as your extension doesn't remember queued downloads, I am not relying on it.

[Umair Ahmed]

On second thought, RAM could be an issue, memory allocation errors do have similar behaviors. Still I would say that, the companion app should manage that still. Many people do not have 16GB of RAM, 128GB is such a for gone thought for me... That should not mean that they can't download stuff when they can play it. That would necessitate a RAM size to the video size which is not even apparent in streams.