Please test version 8.2.2.2 Beta (Firefox only)

[paulrouget]

A subtle improvement for some videos where we select a better CDN for faster speed (impact vimeo mostly): https://downloadhelper.net/data/vdh-mozilla-beta-latest.xpi

[paulrouget]

/cc @Mattmjs @GrampaWildWilly this version will not show any dash/mpd content if we find a HLS with a good CDN.

[paulrouget]

@Mattmjs @GrampaWildWilly I've pushed version 8.2.2.4 which should fix the problem with the last link.

[Mattmjs]

It works first time, no reload needed. So next stable on the way ? or other things need sorting out first.

[GrampaWildWilly]

For Matt's URL, there is no config json. In fact, there is no json at all in the Network Monitor. The information is in a file of type HTML in the domain player.vimeo.com, the domain where we often find our manifest information. I did, as we often do, a Save Response. When I paste that into a Notepad++ window, I get a file that pretty much does look like a json. But its name isn't config. It's https://player.vimeo.com/video/898312290. Inside there, I find 7 m3u8 URLs. But it turns out there's really only 2 URLs. The first 4 URLs are duplicates of a manifest in domain akamaized.net. The last 3 URLs are duplicates of a manifest in domain skyfire.vimeocdn. This pattern of 7 is something I've seen a number of times before.

So after adjusting % to %% and \u0026 to &, I ran ffprobe on the 2 manifests:

ffprobe.txt

There's 2 ffprobe reports in there. They look pretty much the same, including the captions.

In this case, the ampersands are escaped as \u0026 which is not what I usually see. Usually, I see \\u0026 with back slash being doubled. So I don't even know how they decide to do things.

So I ran 4 ffmpeg invocations, 2 for the mp4 videos & 2 for the vtt subtitles.

Akamaized Video mp4 Log.txt
Akamaized Video vtt Log.txt
Skyfire Video mp4 Log.txt
Skyfire Video vtt Log.txt

Here are the results. First, the 2 captions:

Now the 2 mp4 videos:

The akamaized download is somewhat faster, but not by a lot. In any case, as you can see, the 2 CDNs supplied identical results.

And here is one of them playing in VLC:

I didn't sit & watch them, just sampled them at intervals. They both had audio & video all the way to the end. They also both had the subtitles. The ffprobe reports label these captions as machine generated. I didn't watch this carefully enough to assess how accurate the subtitles are. I've seen some pretty lousy automatically generated captions & I've seen some decent ones. Somebody who is actually interested in sitting in front of this for an hour & a half will have to tell us how good these subtitles might be.

But I am still mystified how you decide which one to choose. There is no json at all with this video. The required information is in an object identified as HTML. Its contents aren't even HTML but the manifest URLs are in there.

Based on our experience, there are several patterns with Vimeo content. We've always just improvised our solutions. Every case seems to have presented its own template. There are a few templates. This one doesn't even supply a json. How will you choose which CDN to rely on? If one of them seems consistently better in Taiwan, that doesn't necessarily mean the same one will be better in Toulouse. How are you making this decision?

[paulrouget]

But I am still mystified how you decide which one to choose. There is no json at all with this video

The json is not always there, but accessible in the html. From there there's are info to know which CDN should be the default.

[GrampaWildWilly]

Oh. Tricky. So there is always a json, just not always visible in the Network Monitor. Something to keep you busy, right?

[spookycat567]

Hi, Is there one for chrome?

[paulrouget]

No not yet.