Companion App Downloading Jumpy Videos (Quicktime/OSX)

[Cirque]

I've purchased a license to download streaming video. Something I've noticed (and this happens on a number of sites) that whenever I download a video using HLS Streaming, that it ends up jumpy in Quicktime. This just happened while downloading a video from the platform Crowdcast.io, but it's happened on other sites too.

I'm on Firefox on OSX (10.15.7). Both Quicktime and Preview experience 'jumpy' video. The frames are jerky and jarring. The audio is fine. However, the video plays normally inside VLC.

Quicktime is the normal program I use for opening/watching MP4 files, so this is an issue.

I'm not sure what is wrong. Is this a codec issue? How do I fix this?

Thank you.

[Wild Willy]

If you search this forum using the search term "jumpy" you will find numerous threads,
recent & old, that pretty much uniformly reinforce the advice you gave yourself above,
and I quote you:

However, the video plays normally inside VLC.

Yes. VLC is the recommended player. You have given yourself the evidence that QuickTime
does not do as good a job as VLC. Draw the inevitable conclusion. Stop using QuickTime.
Stick with VLC. There are more elaborate workarounds mentioned in the threads you will
find if you search for them. It's up to you whether you will read them & follow the
advice there. The simple answer is to let go of QuickTime & hang onto VLC.

[Marcel]

Actually, VideodownloadHelper does seem to create broken mp4 files for HLS sources and VLC just hapens to often (but not always) better deal with these files. However if you make VideodownloadHelper download HLS sources as M2TS files (there is an option for that), the jumpyness disappears and you can then use some tool to repackage the video in MP4 for instance.

[Cirque]

Why should I be limited to one app to play the videos when I paid for a license to be able to download MP4s that are fully functioning?

The "inevitable conclusion" is that Video DownloadHelper creates broken MP4 files and I did not get what I paid for.

VLC is known for finding a way to play the most broken and incomplete files. Just because VLC is a remarkable app doesn't mean that my concerns about VDH should be ignored.

Thanks to Marcel for the M2TS suggestion. Although I'd rather not have to download once and then repackage through something like ffmpeg if possible.

I'd rather just press one button and receive a non-jumpy MP4 I can play across multiple apps.

[Penny Foriathotts]

Cirque is right. MP4 is not a player-specific format, and there are no known issues with Quicktime Player playing MP4s. If an MP4 is jumpy on Quicktime Player, it's a problem with the file, not the player, and I personally don't want to install yet another single-purpose app just to be able to watch videos generated by one particular plugin. I'd much rather it just generated correctly-encoded files that all standard players understand so I don't have to keep my standard-format video files categorized by which app created them. You're not supposed to have to do that, that's why there are standard formats. 

[jcv...@gmail.com]

All I can say is that we do not intentionally corrupt the file so that you purchase a license.

jerome

[Christian Nazareno]

Its all right 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Video DownloadHelper Q&A" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to video-downloadhelper...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/video-downloadhelper-q-and-a/17faad5c-1dbd-43f7-ab48-9ff8153e080en%40googlegroups.com.

[Marcel]

Sorry, I didn't want to imply that Video Downloadhelper corrupts files on purpose. I just wanted to point out that there is probably a bug in how Video Downloadhelpder stitches together chunks from HLS streams to create MP4 files. Given that HLS streams are quite common and that there are regularly threads complaining about jumpy videos, I would however hope someone would look into it and fix the problem.

Marcel