Downloads from 1vod-adaptive.akamaized.net always fail

[Ze Manel]

When downloading from a subscription site in which all embedded videos have links in this format: 

https://71vod-adaptive.akamaized.net/(...)/dash-video.mp4

the downloaded videos either have no image, or have the entire video sequence displayed in 1-2 seconds, with the remaining 40 or so minutes having audio only.

Is there something I can do?

Thanks

[jcv...@gmail.com]

Hi,

Don't you find separate audio and video streams in the proposed list?

Maybe this could help : https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/aqM0BsvKqcU/m/sS1TfoFtAAAJ

jerome

[Ze Manel]

Thanks you for your reply,

No, I can't find separate streams. 

However, after inspecting the resulting (aggregated) files more carefully, they all have good audio, it's just that the video stream is condensed in 3-4 seconds. Ie an entire 100 minutes passes by in <5 seconds. After that, the image is blank and the audio continues playing normally for the remaining 100 or so minutes.

[Wild Willy]

It sounds like you are the second person on here to report this case:

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

Your case sounds like an even more severe case than the ones I've encountered. It is
unclear whether this is caused by VDH or the serving web site. I suppose it could even
be a result of a momentary fault in the Internet connection. I have not been able to
tell. Most of the time, my recordings are fine, but every once in a while I get one that
has this problem. I hope that other thread helps. Do please post again to let us know
how you get on. You could even add your comments to the other thread. They would be
relevant there as well. I have not commented previously on this thread because the URL
you gave is behind password protection so I couldn't look at it to try to replicate your
results.

[mjs]

The link looks a lot like how Vimeo does their videos, could the videos be embedded from Vimeo. If you look at the hit details what does

the referrer say. Also what does vdh menu show, could you post a screenshot.

[Wild Willy]

Actually, akamaized.net is, if I am not mistaken, part of that ubiquitous, mysterious
entity known as . . .

THE CLOUD

When we were getting free operas every night from the Metropolitan Opera, they were
served from there. You don't surf to akamaized.net. You actually surf to somewhere else
& the content on that site turns out to be hosted not on that site, but up there in the
cloud, which happens to mean akamaized.net in this case. Other common parts of the cloud
I have observed are Cloudfront, Amazon Web Services (AWS), bc.googleusercontent. There's
surely others but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The original
poster here said he was on a subscription site so there's no way any of us can
investigate what he is trying to do.

But I don't think any of that is relevant. I have observed on relatively infrequent
occasions the exact same thing our original poster has observed. The audio is perfect
but the video is at some ridiculous multiple of natural speed. I recorded the 4 rounds
of a golf tournament from Golf Channel using VDH this past weekend. This past Thursday,
Friday, & Saturday, the recordings of the livestreams were perfect. Sunday, for some
inexplicable reason, the recording had exactly this problem. The audio was perfect for
the entire 4 hours of the broadcast. The tournament ended up with a 3-way tie & it took
2 playoff holes to determine a winner. Excellent show. I wish all tournaments went to a
playoff. The corresponding video was squished into a little over an hour. This was
actually the worst case I have encountered. The entire broadcast was bad. In the past,
I have always had some portion of the broadcast being good & the bad part starting an
hour or two into the show. But Sunday, the broadcast began with sped-up video. I
settled upon a speed reduction to 34% of what I had. That showed the golfers walking up
the fairways at normal human speed. So I extracted & separated the video & audio tracks
from the original & post-processed the video track, like I explain in the thread I refer
to above. It took about FIVE AND A HALF HOURS for ffmpeg to give me a video that looked
like humans playing golf & not munchkins scurrying around in a sped-up simulation of
reality. I decided to leave the audio & video in separate files & play them
synchronously in VLC. The audio kept drifting behind the video. This tells me that I
should have tried a speed reduction between 33% & 34% of the downloaded original. I did
watch a bit at 33% before I launched the conversion but it looked a bit too slow, and 35%
was too fast. So the real speed was somewhere in between 33% & 34%. When I started to
watch the finished product, I had to advance the audio playback by a fraction of a
second. But every minute or two, I was advancing the audio track to get it closer to
synching with the video. The cues were, of course, the sound of the golf clubs swishing
through the air & smacking the golf balls. By the time the tournament was over, I had
advanced the audio track nearly 5 minutes. When I say I advanced the audio track, I mean
I was pretty much wearing out the j key. That's the VLC command for advancing the audio
track. I was willing to live with this minor annoyance because I sure wasn't going to
convert the file at another speed reduction factor for another 5+ hours. I would still
be tinkering with it instead of already managing to watch the golf & then delete all the
files.

I do very much hope our original poster comes back here & posts again. I want to know if
anything I say in the other thread makes any sense to him. I want to know if he will try
the technique I've outlined. I want to know what sort of success he has with it. I do
hope this is not yet another drive-by problem report.

[Wild Willy]

We now have a collection of threads, most of them fairly recent, all of them sharing the distressing commonality that the original poster seems to have disappeared & lost interest in the discussion.  Moreover, not a single one of these cases includes a proper problem description.

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/xB1XQOFs0zo
https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/WfQfhriLDNI
https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/i8bP8DOVN00
https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/4BaGtP_xbQY

In all of these cases, I have offered this thread as a workaround.  I admit it doesn't fix VDH.  I also have to say that it is unclear whether VDH is the cause of this problem.  But it is a problem I have observed & I have come up with a way to deal with the issue:

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

This thread is new enough that I can't yet judge whether the original poster has lost interest.  Based on the trend, I am not optimistic:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/SSgY9oLoHdw

On the other hand, this user posted what is very close to a proper problem description.  So maybe I should be more optimistic.

Here is the problem description.  Something happens intermittently that causes the video to run at a ridiculously fast rate while the audio plays normally.  I first noticed this a year ago & I have seen this multiple times in the interim.  I get it with Golf Channel livestreamed tournaments.  But I get it maybe once every 10 or 15 rounds of golf.  The intermittency of the problem does make it nearly impossible to nail down.  I just wish one of these posters, I don't care which one, would follow up.  Try my approach.  Does it help?  Did it trigger a better idea you could be cajoled into sharing with us here in public?  This is a problem that I wish could be identified & I would welcome a workaround that is less of a kludge than the one I've been using.  But I've offered the kludge & nobody else has offered anything.  Nobody else has even said whether they can apply my kludge.  Nobody else has said whether they have a better idea.  I'm pretty sure this is not a problem with VDH but I'm not 100% certain.  Since it is intermittent, Michel probably can't replicate it so there isn't any hope a fix to VDH is forthcoming.  The assumption that this is caused by VDH is not entirely supported by the facts.  The fact is that most downloads with VDH DO NOT exhibit this too-fast-video problem.  So blaming VDH is a hard sell.  My suspicion is that there is some field in the control block of the video that indicates the video speed.  I believe this control block is known as the MOOV atom.  My suspicion is that one field in the MOOV atom needs to be repaired.  How did the field get corrupted?  Beats me.  Maybe there was momentary noise on the line.  I though TCP/IP had built-in safeguards to prevent such corruption but I believe it is not foolproof.  It can correct single-bit errors but it might not catch double-bit errors.  Maybe the video was encoded incorrectly by the serving web site.  Maybe this, maybe that.  Maybe maybe maybe.  How do you repair the damage?  Beats me.  I don't know the internal structure of a MOOV atom.  But you'll notice my repeated us of the word, "suspicion."  I'm guessing.  I'm not a guru in these matters.  I'm a guru only in watching golf tournaments.  I'm also a guru in railing against the deplorable state of apparent apathy among the people posting these problems . . . and problems in general in this forum.  All I know is that the video in these cases is not totally corrupted.  If you slow playback down by some factor, you will see a proper video.  The slow down factor is something you can determine only by trial & error.  Sometimes you can play it at 50%, sometimes 25%. sometimes it's some fraction that is probably an irrational number.  Irrational number.  A mathematical term.  If you don't know it, look it up.

Trying all the resolutions -- resolutions, not qualities -- offered by VDH is probably not productive.  For one thing, I see this problem with livestreams.  I don't know the problem has occurred until after the livestream ends.  You can't chase play the livestream while VDH is recording it.  I've tried.  You can't do it.  So you can't know you've got the too-fast-video problem until the recording is complete.  So by the time I might reach the decision of trying the other resolutions, the livestream is no longer available at any resolution, even the one I just recorded.  So that suggestion is a non-starter.  Besides, like I say, the problem usually does NOT occur.

All I can do is post this comment in each of the applicable threads & hope somebody sees it & progresses this discussion.

[Jeremy K]

I am running into the same issue now too. Play it VLC you just get a frozen image with audio, play it with Windows Media Player/Movies & TV/Photos apps and the video plays in fast forward while the audio works fine. Isn't this what VDH is meant to do, make it easy to download videos? These programming language-like solutions are not helpful to normies either.

[Wild Willy]

Refer to my answer to you over here:

https://groups.google.com/g/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/c/gA0EsdAwrlY

[mjs]

Jeremy, telling us you have the same problem doesn't help anyone. You have not listed the common factors of this problem.

- is it behind login and password

- is the video private or public

- is the video hosted with Vimeo or some other video platform.

I just recently made a post on this,refer to it to see if it helps

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

[Jeremy K]

Yes

Private

Other platform which it previously worked on and the reason I paid for it.