New version works - but downloads in wrong language

[Kanichiro]

Your question

I downloaded the new update a few days ago, it did work perfectly for a couple of days. However, today although it did recognize the video, it downloaded with the wrong language. I just downloaded ONLY the audio for one video and again it was in German not English which is the default language on my computer. This audio problem was a common issue not that long ago!

NOTE: was NOT able to obtain the info for my Addon and CoApp from FireFox as requested, so I grabbed info for Video-Downloadhelper from WaterFox. I have been completely unsuccessful in installing the CoApp in WaterFox, but it IS installed in FireFox! I have not been able to use video-downloadhelper in WaterFox for several years as CoApp will not install in that browser!

Addon & CoApp version and details

version: 9.3.0.1
target: mozilla
channel: stable
lang: en-US
coapp: {"found":false,"error":"No such native application net.downloadhelper.coapp"}
license: {"unneeded":true}
platform: x86-64 linux
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0
{
"http_media_download_strategy": "inbrowser",
"show_success_notification_for_icognito": true,
"view_options": {
"all_tabs": false,
"low_quality": false,
"sort_by_status": true,
"sort_reverse": false,
"show_button_clean": true,
"show_button_clean_all": false,
"show_button_convert_local": true,
"hide_downloaded": false
},
"open_count_store": 1,
"history_limit_in_days": 1
}

[Kanichiro]

I figured out how to grab the info from FireFox that I've posted below. Sorry for the confusion!

version: 9.3.0.1
target: mozilla
channel: stable
lang: en-US
coapp: {"found":true,"path":"/opt/vdhcoapp/vdhcoapp","version":"2.0.19","new_version":false}
license: {"unneeded":true}
platform: x86-64 linux
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:134.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/134.0
{
"http_media_download_strategy": "inbrowser",
"used_history_button": true,
"download_directory": "/home/mederia/Desktop",
"show_success_notification_for_icognito": true,
"view_options": {
"all_tabs": false,
"low_quality": false,
"sort_by_status": true,
"sort_reverse": false,
"show_button_clean": true,
"show_button_clean_all": false,
"show_button_convert_local": true,
"hide_downloaded": false
},
"use_legacy_ui": false,
"use_sidebar": true,
"open_count_store": 1,
"successfull_dl": 47,
"download_history": {
"__serializer_tag": "map",
"__serializer_value": []
},
"history_limit_in_days": 0
}

[GrampaWildWilly]

You need to read what's below.

[jcfrog]

Sorry for that, this language issue is on the top of the todo list.
We had a lot of issues recently with Youtube, thanks for your comprehension.

[JP-63-JP]

I'm glad to hear you could follow the instructions. It took me rather a long time to learn all those bits. So you might think it took you some time, but believe me, I've saved you a whole lot more time than you'll ever know.

You should post the URL of the video that gave you trouble. There are times when the approach doesn't work for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. Maybe I'll see a way to make it work. Or maybe I'll see why it won't work. Let's see that URL.

The next day, I was able to get your method to work with that same YT video link. I am pretty sure the "details" from the manifest changed from the first day to the next (there is something in there about timeout or expiration). In any case, I only tried 2 more videos on the second day and they both downloaded fine - with the correct language (audio) stream.

[GrampaWildWilly]

I'm not adept enough (like not at all) at web programming to know how to get the URL of the media given only the URL of the web page. I suspect our dev would know how to do that. I mean, that sort of logic does seem to be embedded in VDH. The only thing I would know how to do is look for the URL of the HLS master manifest in the Hit Details provided by VDH, then run ffprobe on that. That's a semi-manual, semi-programmed process. Not quite what you are trying to do. There is nothing in VDH/CoApp that is amenable to execution from the command line. There was some discussion on here several months ago about adding a scripting facility to VDH. But we've seen no such feature to date. It may still be on the to-do list, it may not. I'm not privy to these things.

About the only thing that wouldn't change from day to day is the URL of the YouTube page. Under the covers, the URLs are generated every time you visit that page. Even if you reload the page, the URLs change. My understanding is there is tracking information in the URLs that connects the media to your web session. A URL that you would extract would probably not work for me. And yes, there is also expiration information in there. If you visit a YouTube page & just let it sit for a while, like maybe a couple of hours, maybe less, I really don't know, then you try to play that video, YouTube will throw an error in your face. I don't remember now the exact wording but it's something like "invalid data." Their error ought to be "timed out, reload the page," but it's not.

There is a thread on our old Google Groups forum with the title, "How to download from YouTube." I wrote that a couple of years ago during a stretch of a couple of months when VDH was totally unable to deal with YouTube due to one of their periodic upheavals. I think the YouTube devs try to justify their existence by completely revamping the way the site works every few months. They might even be operating under the mandate that they must make it nigh on impossible for third-party software to download from YouTube. Every time they change their site, VDH is utterly incapable of downloading from YouTube. VDH must be tweaked, a bit or sometimes extensively, to restore the functionality we've always enjoyed. That episode of VDH non-functionality a couple of years ago lasted a couple of months, which was much longer than the typical time it takes for the dev to come up with a solution. During that delay, I discovered a way to do downloads from YouTube using only ffprobe & ffmpeg without any help from VDH. It involved the Firefox Network Monitor. It's a particularly tedious process. It also doesn't work in all cases. In addition, the download speeds were regularly pitiful. But there may be some ideas in there that you might find useful.

[RobertL-CH]

I'm interested in what you say about YT throwing an error in your face. I routinely open a new YT video in a fresh Firefox tab and then, after watching part of it or none of it at all, don't come back to it for a day or several days or even weeks. I typically have a dozen such paused YT videos scattered through 10 instances of Firefox which I leave open permanently (i.e. until the next reboot). And I have never once seen the kind of error you mention. Normally when I come back to a paused YT video and hit the play button YT immediately plays whatever it had cached when I paused, then it resyncs. Resync may involve a short pause, and always goes back and replays the last 10 to 30 seconds before the pause point. I've been doing this for a couple of years and have never once seen the kind of error message you describe (though I use several other streaming websites which invariably have hysterics after an overnight pause). I'm always using the latest Firefox under Windows 7 and 10.

PS. I always make a point of reading your posts. They are always informative and well written. Thanks for your efforts.

[GrampaWildWilly]

Well-written . . . I appreciate the appreciation.

I don't know about the timeout. I've experienced it, although not often because I rarely have a YouTube page open longer than it takes to download whatever is on the page. I occasionally get something off YouTube for my own reasons. Far more often, I get on YouTube to chase a link a fellow user has posted here. It has been rather a long while since I encountered the timeout issue. Perhaps they've changed the way the site works. I'm pretty sure I'm not hallucinating. I remember having left something open for an hour or two. When I discovered it later, I said oh yeah, I wanted to see that. I clicked the play button & got the error. A reload of the page cleared the problem. But like I say, it's been rather a long time since I hit that. If they've changed that, & what you say points in that direction, then great. I stand corrected.

I think I'll pick something random & leave it open for a few hours to see what happens.

[GrampaWildWilly]

As threatened, I did run a test. I picked a YouTube page at random & let it sit for about 4 hours while I was not even using my computer. Sure enough, when I did finally come back to it & clicked the play button, it immediately started playing the video. That is a change that has happened but I have no idea how long ago. Apparently, at least 2 years if your experience is any measure. Shows you how aware of things I am.

I will note, however, something that VDH does. If you visit a YouTube page where VDH recognizes something but let it sit idle, after a certain amount of time, maybe half an hour, maybe less, I haven't measured, VDH unrecognizes the content. To get VDH to rerecognize the content, you have to reload the web page using the browser's own page reload or use the new VDH Force detection feature . . . which just does a page reload anyway.

[exquirentibus]

@GrampaWildWilly I appreciate your long reply but .. I download maybe 20 YoutTube videos a day that I might refer to later for certain programming techniques.

I can't do extensive processing on each video .. or Any processing really .. beyond just selecting the format if I wanted a smaller resolution output. I can devote just a few minutes to this task each day.

What I .. need .. is a way to have VDH output the current stream it thinks is English .. and let me sequence thru the available languages until I find the actual English.

The English is there .. I can hear if just fine if I play the video inside of YouTube.

I just need a Very simple way to guide VDH to the 'correct' language?

So .. that's my feature request. Have VDH play a few seconds of the audio with a key press that will move to the Next audio track until I can find the 'correct' one.

[GrampaWildWilly]

I suspect that the implementation of the correction will be simpler than your suggestion. You will go into the gear settings within the video player on the YouTube page. You will select your language. VDH will then download with that language as the audio track. In addition, VDH will likely offer a way within its menu to select the alternative audio tracks. Of course, since I don't work for VDH, I'm just speculating.

You have a choice. You can suffer with the way things are now until a product correction shows up. That will be after some unknown delay, during which you will not have the content you want. Alternatively, you can learn how to do what I've described above. It is quite simple. Once you've done it a few times, you'll find it goes faster. If you learn how to do it & practice it, you can have your desired content right now, no waiting required.

The choice is yours.

[Runeboard]

Has this problem been fixed for other (non-YouTube) websites yet?

[jay353535]

The developers said in another thread that it's an acknowledged issue for Youtube but not their top priority to fix. Right now they're trying to get full download functionality working again.

[rjflory]

Its still an issue, but indirect work-arounds, as mentioned earlier do exist. Gitbash is a Linux-style shell/tool environment for windoze. I use the 'gitbash' script attached below to limp around the problem. This script allows the "Main" URL to be simply pasted (without tedious fixups) directly onto the commandline and offers some degree of customization without forcing manual edits for every download. Feel free to use or ignore as you like. I had to rename the script extent/type ".sh" as ".txt" to make the github uploader happy, simply rename the script extent/type back to to ".sh" before use.

VDH_fixup.txt

gitbash for windows project page is here: https://gitforwindows.org

[Mattmjs]

I use yt-dlp to bring up the list of formats, select video + audio ( english track if multiple languages ) execute and done.
Needs ffmpeg for merging files together.

[GrampaWildWilly]

I still don't work for VDH (doubt I ever will) but my environment has had updates to the operating system, the browser, & VDH: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit version 24H2 build 26100.3624, Firefox 136.0.4 64-bit, licensed VDH 9.3.5.2 beta, CoApp 2.0.20. I used an example above provided by fellow user @exquirentibus: https://youtu.be/4CJUoYpGn4o. VDH still downloads the German audio track. I guess this just confirms @paulrouget has not yet gotten around to fixing the language issue on YouTube. @jay353535 mentions non-YouTube sites with a similar issue with language tracks. I wouldn't mind investigating one such example. I'd be curious to see if an approach similar to the one I documented above would work elsewhere, as I suspect it would.

[jay353535]

". @jay353535 mentions non-YouTube sites with a similar issue with language tracks. "
I think you misunderstood my comment. I mentioned that some Youtube video download websites offer the ability to select which audio track the video downloads with. This indicates that audio track differentiation & detection is possible, once there's a UI update to provide a way to select the correct track.

[GrampaWildWilly]

Right. I did misunderstand you. But now I'm looking for your comment I referred to & I don't see it. Did you delete one of your comments? That's never really a good idea. The absence of your original comment makes my comment seem rather nonsensical.

In any case, both your observation that other web sites can do it & my tutorial on how to do it with ffmpeg point to the certainty that VDH can be made to do it, too. Let's hope that happens reasonably soon. At least VDH seems to be working again on YouTube (other than this language issue) for most users.

[enderandpeter]

Forgive me, but I cannot help but to comment. Long time fan of VDH. Been using this thing since college, which was early 2000s for me.

First of all, @GrampaWildWilly maybe you don't work for VDH, but you are clearly their ambassador. I'd say you have the requisite knowledge of video/audio streaming to give them a helping hand, so let me know if you need a letter of recommendation.

Second, your tutorial was more like a dissertation for me, but if I understand right it should be possible to use ffmpeg and ffprobe to download the YouTube video with the right audio, given that the VDH team is still working on recognizing multiple audio tracks. That will be quite a nice feature when ready. Yes, I am also convinced the foreign audio tracks are AI-generated based on how they sound. And yeah, the first language is always German for some reason.

And so, I will study your guide and become a smarter man as a result. Thank you.

[GrampaWildWilly]

[GrampaWildWilly]

As for labor intensive, it gets easier the more you practice it. Write yourself some .bat files so you can reuse stuff you know works.

[GrampaWildWilly]

And in the right half of the Network Monitor, click on the column heading marked Response. That will show you the manifest like I show in my football example above.

[enderandpeter]

Very interesting... something is different about our experiences indeed.

Apologies, I meant to clarify that I did first try to find that .m3u8 but it is not appearing for me:

I'm starting to think that you might see that .m3u8 on several videos whereas I may not... I mainly use Premium YouTube but I still don't see what you report when I use a non-premium account.

Also, I am having this experience on pretty much every video, including the Cowboys vs Eagles, whereas I think you are probably seeing the manifest file on pretty much every video, so I can't help but to think something else is making for our differences.

I should note, filtering "googlevideo" or similar string should still find the .m3u8 in your case as well because the search filter applies to the domain, too. In my case, the response of that videoplayback URL probably is the manifest in the form of a base64-encoded string, if I had to guess on what I'm seeing:

I should disclose I have written a lot of scripts as I am a web application developer myself. I have spent more time with Bash and PowerShell but I do want to be more familiar with batch files (and the original CMD terminal in general) just to keep a good understanding of Windows, so I greatly appreciate your guides. The intense part for me is understanding the video streaming ecosystem, not to mention the vast capabilities of ffmpeg.

This is all very educational. I cannot thank you enough. I am very happy to continue learning from your examples.

[GrampaWildWilly]

Well, if the m3u8 doesn't show up in the Network Monitor, there's always the VDH Hit Details. You get the manifest either way.

[BrBorghi]

I suggest CDH developers get inspiration from how https://turboscribe.ai/ works.
When entering a Youtubeurs URL, it proposes a list of formats and languages. The default language is the original language (not German).

The example is for the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb-Q3AvFTeE which is downloaded in German (not the original language) by VDH.

[xPaPaDx]

Paid for many license keys on different PC's. Please get this working. I want to hear the videos I downloaded in my native language that my rig is setup for: English, and not German. Thank you.