Downloading from Twitter isn't working.

[Nick Sushkevich]

I tried numerous attemts do download several videos from twitter.com feed anfd every time having an error message "MP2T no data recieved"

      

MP2T - No data receivedmoz-extension://c966d218-46d4-6a46-95a1-506e8661427d/background/main.js:1

[Lionel Guerrini]

me too and I don't understand why it worked before.

before I had no problem, but it does this to me with more and more sites and I have the same error information

[Wild Willy]

Typically, when you get that error in VDH, it means you have to switch on a VDH setting.
That setting is on the Behavior tab of the settings. You have to scroll down about 5
times to find it. It's called HLS at M2TS. It is disabled by default. Try enabling it
& see what that does for you. Don't forget to click Save in the settings dialog. It's
down at the bottom right of the dialog. That's a very important step. Click Save. When
you enable that setting, your downloaded file will have the extension .m2ts. That should
present no problem. VLC plays files of that type no problem. You don't need to convert
it to some other type, mp4 for example. Just play the file in VLC as is. Also, you
might want to remember to go back to the VDH setting & uncheck the box (click Save
again). I don't know if you care whether content from other sites might come in as .m2ts
files. Just a thought.

I would check this out myself but I am not a member of Twitter & don't ever intend to be.
It used to be that I could look at pretty much anything on Twitter without signing in. I
just couldn't post, which I have no interest in doing. But they changed something a
while ago & now, after scrolling any Twitter page about 2 or 3 times, it pops up a nag
screen demanding that I log in & won't show me anything else. So forget them. Used to
be I could even download stuff from them using ffmpeg. I can't verify that any more. So
you're on your own with this.

Good luck!

[Wild Willy]

Such fat fingers. It's not called HLS at M2TS. It's called HLS as M2Ts. As, not at.
Sorry.

[mjs]

I think they may find that enabling HLS as M2TS still doesn't work for twitter , atleast that's what it does on videos l see which are embedded

on another site. I don't use twitter or care to be a member of it.

[Wild Willy]

Maybe we can start a new club: people who will never join Twitter.

If you look in my ffmpeg tutorial (which I know you know about), the first example I used
was from Twitter. It encountered the M2TS error. But my evasive maneuver then was to
use ffmpeg instead, which worked famously then. Of course now, I can't get into Twitter,
so I have no idea how ffmpeg works on Twitter now & I quite frankly don't care to find
out. And what you say tells me that the Twitter echo sites probably do not completely
reflect what actual Twitter members see on the site itself. I'd like a user who is a
member of Twitter to post here saying whether the HLS as M2TS setting in VDH solves the
problem on Twitter, not an echo site.

[Wild Willy]

This isn't a Twitter echo site but it is a page that contains some embedded Twitter videos.

https://www.nhl.com/fr/canadiens/news

I've scrolled the page down to an article with this subordinate URL:

https://www.nhl.com/fr/canadiens/news/pezzetta---cetait-agreable-de-voir-ces-enfants-sourire-/c-335429390

That page contains a collection of articles.  You have to scroll to the individual article, scroll it down about a further screenload & a half, then click the button that says "En voir plus."  That's French for "See more."  Clicking the button expands the article I am going to be talking about here.

A short way into the article, there is an embedded Twitter video.  I had to reload the page a couple of times to get VDH to recognize this.  As you can see, I have not hit Play on the Twitter video.

I downloaded the 8:38 variant you can see in that image.  It took only a few seconds.  It appears the Habs web site provides excellent download service, unlike certain other sites we won't mention.  The download did appear to hang at 99% complete for rather a bit.  But then it generated the MP2T error.  So I enabled the VDH setting.  As you reported, this didn't work either.  I ended up with a zombie download on the VDH blue dot status menu.  Clicking the entry on the status menu should tell VDH to kill the download.  But it didn't do that in this case.  I had to reload the extension to clear the zombie.

So of course, I went to the ffmpeg solution.  That worked fine.  Here's the results:

You can't tell from that image but from other information I collected, I can tell you the download completed in 17 seconds.  It played fine in VLC, video & audio, right to the end.

So I suspect ffmpeg still works on Twitter.  The URL for the m3u8 HLS manifest for this video is on video.twimg.com, not the Habs web site, so I would expect the ffmpeg approach still works on Twitter.

But I would still like a member of Twitter to post here telling us whether the HLS as M2TS setting in VDH works on Twitter itself.  Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.  I'd like to get explicit confirmation either way.

[mjs]

A lot of people post their problems in this group and never follow up , so just in case that happens here is another example. This one is a direct

link not an embed.  https://twitter.com/i/status/1563994863972061189

Works in ffmpeg and I think I solved the naming problem Unable to find a suitable output format for 'pga'

pga: Invalid argument

Between each each word add a dot or a underscore, so PGA.Tour.2022.mp4 or PGA_Tour_2022.mp4

[Wild Willy]

Yeah. Another drive-by problem report. Nick, if you're reading this, please come back &
post a follow-up.

As for the default file name offered by VDH, I would never in a million years accept such
an abomination. For one thing, there's a smiley in the middle of it. Then there's the
URL within the name, which means there are slashes & a colon, both of which are invalid
characters in file names. Enclosing the URL in quotation marks is another problem.
Quotation mark is not a valid character in a file name, either. Apostrophe is acceptable
but quotation mark is not. Plus it's just a long name, too unwieldy for my taste. I
changed it to simply "Twitter Test" before launching the download in VDH. Yes, blank is
acceptable & works fine. I went through the futile exercise of downloading it with HLS
as M2TS off, which failed as expected. Then I switched it on & it failed again as
expected. At least with this one, I didn't get a zombie leftover in the blue dot status
menu. Then I did the ffmpeg trick. It's only 720x720 resolution, which is pretty low.
At least it's only 15 seconds long & took only 4 seconds to download. Played fine, of
course, as expected. There's no tricks you have to play with the manifest URL. No
percent signs to double. No &range= to remove. Just a simple HLS manifest URL. I saw 3
resolutions on offer here. Besides 720x720, I saw 540x540 & 320x320. The audio bit
rates listed by ffprobe were 128kb/s for the 720x720 that I downloaded, and 66kb/s &
33kb/s for the other 2. All in all, one of the easier cases we're going to encounter.

[mjs]

I wouldn't except that default name either but I was referring to the naming problem I was having in ffmpeg. It would complain about certain

words used for the file name. I now know how to do the output file name without it complaining and throwing up the Invalid argument message.

[Wild Willy]

Yeah, ffmpeg is even more sensitive than VDH. At least in VDH you can give it names with
accented letters. But ffmpeg won't take those. Actually it does take them, but it
mangles some of them & just fails with others. I'm careful to restrict myself to the 26
letters of the English alphabet, upper & lower case, the 10 digits, space, #, @, -, _,
and maybe a couple more. But it's really picky. I wouldn't try Greek letters or
Cyrillic or Chinese/Japanese/Korean or any other alphabet. I avoid all diacriticals like
ā, č, ł, ñ, and so on. Complete the download of the file & then after the fact alter the
name to include such characters if you want. I have wondered if maybe there are
"language packs" for ffmpeg but I've never been sufficiently motivated to look for those.
I've wondered if maybe there might be some particular switch that could be enabled when
ffmpeg is built that would give it support for special characters like these.. I've never
even considered building my own ffmpeg so I've never investigated whether
language-specific build switches exist. I have been able to live with the restrictions
we've both observed. I've just downloaded the files & changed their names to things like
Die Zauberflöte or Les Pêcheurs de Perles or Così fan tutte (that's not a dot on that i)
after I have the files safely received on my system.