YouTube items that contain audio but no video

[Wild Willy]

We've had numerous reports on here of people finding YouTube clips that are audio without
video. Look at this example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGpA5mRO_Jk

I used this one in another thread to illustrate something entirely unrelated to this
topic. I first encountered this particular video the day it was posted, which was just a
few weeks ago, on July 26. On that day, VDH happily downloaded a 1920x1080 variant. But
today, the situation is as you can see in the attached image.

Between July 26 & today, I have not changed my version of VDH (licensed 7.6.1a2 beta) nor
my version of the CoApp (1.6.3), both of which remain the latest versions as of this
moment. Of course, I've been running Windows 7 64-bit forever. Firefox has definitely
changed. I may have gotten 2 updates in the interim, I honestly don't remember. I'm
currently on 91.0 but I see I've gotten an update within the last few minutes. I won't
know until I cycle the browser what version I've got now. I'll try the new Firefox & see
if that makes any difference. I'm predicting it won't but I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm
trying here to identify what might have changed between the day I got a full HD version
of this video & today. Certainly, the browser has changed. But the other variable is
YouTube itself. They're always foisting frivolous updates on us. Michel does his best
to keep up but there may be a lag between the useless change on YouTube & Michel
providing us with the appropriate update in VDH/CoApp to deal with it.

So the big question is: Does what I'm observing here qualify as a VDH bug? Is VDH really
being provided the information but just not looking in the right place? Or is YouTube
really not letting the world know about every variant they have on their site? Looking
at it from where I sit, as a user with no access to either VDH or YouTube code, without
the technical knowledge to understand the code anyway, I can't tell where the problem
lies. All I know is that for some videos on YouTube, you may be lucky to find one
variant that includes both video & audio. For the rest, we're just out of luck. I was
lucky that my sample video here happened to have one resolution at which YouTube
condescended to provide me with a variant that contained both video & audio. But I can
imagine there's lots of content on YouTube that offers only audio & in those cases, we're
stuck. Today. We don't know if Michel will come up with a solution tomorrow, next week,
next month. But for now, we're stuck.

[Wild Willy]

We also have reports of people downloading from YouTube & getting video without audio. I
believe it's the same problem. You just have to try all the variants that VDH offers &
hope one of them has both audio & video. If you can't find one, then you're just out of
luck for that particular video. I do so wish there were an international standard for
the way web sites present A/V content. It's such anarchy right now. And guess who the
victims are?

[Wild Willy]

It seems Firefox has bumped me up to release 90.0.1 now. Sadly, I was right & it made no
difference in my results with VDH on that sample video.

It occurs to me that there is another permutation here. It's possible that YouTube might
not offer any variant that has both audio & video. But there is content for which VDH
might detect both a variant that has audio without video as well as one that has video
without audio. In that case you would download both those variants. Then you could
leave the 2 files separate & play them synchronously in VLC, as I explain here:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/YwvzcYm-fP0

Or you could aggregate the 2 files into a single file using the tool available within
VDH.

But in the case of my example here, you can see on the VDH menu that there are several
variants that have audio without video & the one variant that has both audio & video.
There is no variant of this sample video that has video without audio. I repeat, there's
no consistency with YouTube. It's just a case by case, trial & error situation. Good
luck.