Video downloads are broken on youtube

[Felix Uhl]

System Details:

• Operating System: macOS

• Persepolis Version: 4.0.0

• How do you install Persepolis? Via nixpkgs, see NixOS/nixpkgs#288825

• Please attach log files if crash or paste error message

Issue Description and steps to reproduce:
The first part of the download seems to work fine, but the video part is downloaded within 1 second, while the audio part takes much longer, and muxing with ffmpeg fails with the following error (taken from /Library/Application Support/persepolis_download_manager):

Persepolis - ERROR - ffmpeg error: Not detecting m3u8/hls with non standard extension and non standard mime type
    Last message repeated 4 times
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x122e0e170] moov atom not found
[in#0 @ 0x122e0ddc0] Error opening input: Invalid data found when processing input

This is caused by the build script in https://github.com/persepolisdm/mac-package-build downloading ffmpeg without pinning a version. As ffmpeg has released version 6 a while ago, which contains this commit, m3u8 is not a standard extension for HLS files anymore.

The solution would be to pass -allowed_extensions ALL to ffmpeg. Alternatively, bundling ffmpeg 5 also works.

I fixed that and tried again, which caused the following error:

Persepolis - ERROR - ffmpeg error: [https @ 0x12801f400] Protocol 'https' not on whitelist 'file,crypto,data'!
[hls @ 0x127704360] Error when loading first segment 'https://rr2---sn-h0jelnez.googlevideo.com/videoplayback/id/50d0fdf004ce3f46/itag/616/source/youtube/expire/1709415834/ei/OknjZe6dMKiFi9oP96uK0Ac/ip/2003:fd:f03:f900:b89b:6ece:63b3:bb48/requiressl/yes/ratebypass/yes/pfa/1/wft/1/sgovp/clen%3D20127089%3Bdur%3D66.107%3Bgir%3Dyes%3Bitag%3D356%3Blmt%3D1681767011083507/rqh/1/hls_chunk_host/rr2---sn-h0jelnez.googlevideo.com/xpc/EgVo2aDSNQ%3D%3D/mh/km/mm/31,26/mn/sn-h0jelnez,sn-4g5ednsz/ms/au,onr/mv/m/mvi/2/pl/37/initcwndbps/1566250/vprv/1/playlist_type/DVR/txp/5532434/mt/1709393845/fvip/5/keepalive/yes/fexp/24007246/sparams/expire,ei,ip,id,itag,source,requiressl,ratebypass,pfa,wft,sgovp,rqh,xpc,vprv,playlist_type/sig/AJfQdSswRQIgQnwxP63uQIw5PySkxwvdBalex3s4bJdyIGnO2NQXOZ8CIQDtZ-g_1V5va33cNGrwydTrpdow3nb6kC-ntOf8jMatXg%3D%3D/lsparams/hls_chunk_host,mh,mm,mn,ms,mv,mvi,pl,initcwndbps/lsig/APTiJQcwRQIgCz_z3UFoShtVx-DZ0yC6_PHbOHALjErKL44W1omWkN8CIQCWaukyNU28YfQSiJ6YieRe3w_2QR1ciAuezsqaj2pS6Q%3D%3D/playlist/index.m3u8/govp/slices%3D0-1027479/gosq/0/file/seg.ts'

This can (in theory) be fixed by passing -protocol_whitelist file,https,tcp,tls to ffmpeg. However, it doesn't actually work. While it makes the download finish, the resulting file's video stream is invalid:

But the file can be played back, and I can hear the audio:

I dug a bit further into the code, and found that Persepolis actually doesn't use yt-dlp for downloading videos, only for listing the available resolutions and audio formats! The actual download is then done with aria2, but the video format is only a m3u8 (or HLS) playlist, which means it isn't actually downloaded at first. Only when muxing, ffmpeg will try to stream the playlist and silently fail, causing the broken video stream.

---

At this point, I gave up on fixing the issue myself. Trying to use ffmpeg to download the youtube video streams correctly is very challenging, that's exactly why yt-dlp exists.

So the proper fix would be to download videos with yt-dlp internally, not with aria2, but AFAICT, this would require some major changes to be compatible with the current GUI, and I don't have time right now to make that happen.

[Kia Hamedi]

Hi dear @iFreilicht

Thanks for your bug report, yes we had some inconsistencies in the previous version that were fixed in version ‍4.0.1.
I request you to download the new version from Releasetag 4.0.1 for Mac and test again!
Also, using VLC instead of Quicktime on Mac is a more suitable suggestion

Kia Hamedi

[Felix Uhl]

Indeed, this works perfectly now, thank you!