Download streaming video from Resi

[Hadidi]

Hello I would like to download this video that is here: https://control.resi.io/webplayer/video.html?id=Y2FiNGJlZDQtNDVjMC00MjhjLWJkNmYtMmI2ZDQ3N2VhYTEwOjhiNzY4MzBkLWZmZmEtMTFlZC1hZTJjLTc1MWQ0MWRiOGQyMg%3D%3D&type=library&autoplay=true

But I haven't found a way to download the video, and I was not able to get VLC to play or stream the video.

Thanks in advance,

Hadidi

[mjs]

It's a dash stream which VDH has trouble with, can you try doing what's shown in this video : https://youtube.com/watch?v=yRrcxXp14do

Your looking for a .mpd url & come back with results.

--

A vdh user

[Wild Willy]

Hi mjs. I found an object of type xml that ffprobe was perfectly happy to read as a DASH
manifest. I've attached that ffprobe report. There are 6 video streams of various
resolutions, 1 audio stream, & 1 stream that looks like it's trying to be English
captions. But ffprobe doesn't recognize it because it is not WEBVTT. It is wvtt, which
apparently is an error.

I would consider downloading this but look at the duration ffprobe is reporting. Plus
it's got a start offset of about 26 seconds as well. If I didn't know any better, I'd
say this was actually a livestream. The manifest certainly isn't for a simple 51 minute
video, which is what you can see on that web page.

This case looks very fishy.

But wait. There's more. For reasons too complicated to explain . . . or maybe they're
too embarrassing . . . I'm going to post again in a few moments. Stay tuned.

[Wild Willy]

Well it wasn't a few moments but . . . Can't be helped.

I decided to trawl through the jsons. When I stumbled on this one (see the attached
image), I said this looks interesting.

Cute trick I just discovered. If you click the mouse once on one of those URLs in the
right part of the Network Monitor, in the Response area, it transforms the URL into a
text field with your cursor positioned at the end. So then do Shift+Home to highlight
the whole thing. Then do Ctrl+Insert to copy it to the clipboard. Then go over to your
text editor & do Shift+Insert to paste the URL into . . . oh I don't know . . . an
invocation of ffprobe perhaps, just picking something completely off the wall.

I'm attaching the ffprobe reports for those 2 URLs. Two reports in one file. The DASH
report is still the same trash from my preceding post. But the HLS report is golden.
Plus, the captions are recognized. So I got the 51-minute video. In a separate
download, I got the captions. The logs of those downloads are also attached to this
post. Each log shows how long the download took & what download speed I was getting.
The download of the captions was strangely slow like a snail. Weird. But captions are
typically small text files, this being no exception, so the captions actually downloaded
in a relatively short time. The serving web site gave pretty good download speed for the
video. Not spectacular, but a tremendous lot better than YouTube.

So it turns out that this is a tricky case. On the surface, this looks like a DASH
stream. Only the DASH manifest is showing up directly in the Network Monitor. That
probably explains, as mjs said, why VDH has trouble with this one. VDH is known to be
unable to handle DASH streams. But with a little digging, you can find more information.
It turns out that this is actually an HLS stream. I don't think VDH would have processed
this HLS master manifest correctly even if it had found it. There's 6 video tracks of
various resolutions sharing a single audio track. That's another pattern that VDH is
known to have trouble with. Then there's the captions, which VDH doesn't handle in any
way.

The video played great in VLC. It's a 1920x1080 video & the bit rates are, surprisingly,
well above average. So the quality of the image is pretty good in addition to it being a
full HD resolution. I began watching it to see how good the captions were & ended up
watching the whole thing. Which is why this post is so late. Fascinating talk. I think
the captions might have been machine generated. There were a lot of mistakes in them but
they were good enough . . . if your mother tongue is English. If you aren't an English
speaker, or at least not fluent in English, the captions will make very little sense in a
lot of places. There's a lot of words in the captions that kind of sound like what he
was saying but they're actually gibberish. If this guy were speaking French, I would not
have understood him, & my French is pretty good. Even with French captions, if they were
as full of mistakes as these English captions are, I'd be in a world of hurt. It would
probably take me at least 2 days to fix these caption, something I'm not about to do.

But that's a digression. Hadidi, if you really want to understand what I did, you're
going to have to read this:

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

The title of that thread mentions "too fast" but that is only one of many uses of that
thread. You need to read it carefully, including the references to secondary discussions
whose links are within that one. There's no shortcuts. Either you are motivated to
learn & you are motivated to get your videos . . . or you aren't. It's your choice.

[mjs]

woah Willy , you're up at some late hours there. Doesn't that wear you out ? What about the computer, does it get shut down or put to sleep.

But that was odd the dash manifest reading 8 hours, the video player says it's 51 minutes. Normally the ffprobe is accurate so is this false reading of the duration. Also I found that after copying the .mpd url you can alter it in notepad to be .m3u8 just like the trick used for vimeo videos.

[Wild Willy]

There's 24 hours in every day. I like to see how many of them I can use. As for my
computer, it's a machine. It never needs sleep.

mpd -> m3u8. Forgot about that one. Of course, you can't expect a program to know to
try that. It's like stealth manifests. If the manifest exists, why in blazes doesn't
the web site send it? If it has both DASH & HLS manifests, which is weird enough on its
own, it should go ahead & send them both. They were both in the json I stumbled across.
I've seen that on YouTube as well. But hey. YouTube. There's no explaining that.

And the bogus duration has to be some sort of error by a dev at the site. I guess it's
lucky that at least the HLS manifest had a good duration. The start value puzzles me,
though. Why would anybody want to start a video 26 seconds late? It turns out that in
this case, it didn't really matter because the video starts with the audience applauding
the speaker, so if some of that was cut off, it was no loss.

[mjs]

Did Hadidi vanish into thin air, was hoping they would try what I suggested & come back with results.

[Wild Willy]

Another drive-by problem report? We've certainly seen lots of those. Maybe he was just
trying to get somebody to watch that video. I suppose he succeeded. I did watch it.
Whatever. We've got enough elsewhere in here to keep us busy.

[mjs]

VLC showed the 8 hour duration when I gave it the mpd manifest so I quit that , tried the m3u8 manifest and it worked sort of.

It terminated 51.31 out of  1 hour 18 min duration. I think it'll work all the way through, but I might have caused it to stop doing other stuff.

[Wild Willy]

No no. The player in the web page of Hadidi's video says it's of duration 51:31. My
ffprobe report on the HLS master manifest shows the duration 51:35. Weird that it's
different but it's by only 4 seconds. The download I did with ffmpeg got a video of the
same 51:35 duration as reported in the ffprobe of the HLS manifest, which is not
surprising. That's how VLC detected the file once it played the downloaded video.

I tried your trick of giving the HLS master manifest to VLC directly. After a moment's
hesitation, it snapped into 1920x1080. I tried the VLC v command & poof magic, the
English captions appeared. The duration reported by VLC was still 51:35.

I don't know where you got 1:18:00 duration. You didn't stop it prematurely before it
was finished. You played the whole thing.

[mjs]

Oops my mistake, I mistakenly thought it was over an hour. So yes I must have got the whole thing then. Do you think it's slower in VLC or

about the same as ffmpeg. What does the resource monitor show. I'm asking since I did it on my bootable usb with linux.

[Wild Willy]

You can see the speed I got with ffmpeg in the log I attached to my post above. I tried
a Convert/Save in VLC just now & I got about the same speed. Maybe slightly slower, but
that could be due to any number of variables: server load, added overhead of VLC vs
ffmpeg, phase of the moon, weather in Tonga, you know, the usual. It was close enough
that I would say there is no particular speed advantage either way doing this with VLC or
ffmpeg. But there is a huge advantage in doing this with ffmpeg for reasons other than
speed. You can pick the resolution you want. VLC gave me the 256x144 variant. I was
able to choose the 1920x1080 variant with ffmpeg. Plus, ffmpeg gave me access to the
captions. Maybe there's a way to tell VLC to pick a higher resolution, & maybe there's a
way to tell it to get the captions. But I'm not sufficiently motivated to figure that
out. I suppose I could fish the URL for the 1920x1080 stream out of the ffprobe report
on the HLS master manifest & feed that to VLC. I'm sure that would get the high
resolution variant. But if you're going to that trouble, you may as well just use
ffmpeg.

However, VLC recorded just the first 3 seconds of this. It spent a while downloading
what Windows claimed was a file of duration 51:31. It had a normal frame rate & bit
rates. But it wouldn't play past 3 seconds. It played the 3 seconds of video perfectly,
but then the image just froze. The audio continued fine. I assume it went on for the
entire 50-something minutes. Obviously, I didn't sit & listen to it to verify that.
Clearly, all I had to do was respeed it like we've discussed at such great length
elsewhere, right? Wrong. The raw video track that I split out really was only 3 seconds
long. VLC didn't record this properly. I even did it twice just to be sure. Something
didn't work. Maybe you can make VLC work to record this with the Convert/Save function.
It just flat didn't work for me. If you manage to make it work, do be sure to give
details (screenshots) on what you specified in the various menus of the Convert/Save
dialog, especially what recording profile you use. There's a whole sub-dialog about the
recording profile. I'm sure there's something in there that I did wrong. So I would
want to see what you specify to make VLC record this properly.

[mjs]

I think I got the same result, smallest video quality and a few seconds of video. VLC doesn't handle master manifests too well if there are

multiple video streams. It does if you've got a single resolution manifest that has video & audio. It worked for a tv episode that I got where the only manifest was for 1280x720 including audio. I believe it had timed_id3 data in it and VLC left it out.

That's probably the few exceptions where it will work.

[Wild Willy]

A handful of times I have put the URL of an HLS master manifest into VLC. But that's the
Open Network Stream (Ctrl+n) function. Usually, it will play at some putrid resolution
for about a second or two, then it will snap to whatever the highest resolution in the
manifest happens to be. After that, it seems quite happy to play the stream for as long
as it lasts. That's a manifest with multiple variants being offered. But that's just to
play a stream. To record a stream with Convert/Save on the exact same manifest seems to
require additional magic spells that I have not discovered. Seems to me we've recorded
something in VLC once. So maybe it's just this site. Whatever. We've got multiple ways
of doing most things & usually we'll stumble on one that works.