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.