Video Playback Broken

[matsd88]

Please take a look at the attached screenshot and give feedback.

[hileo]

I have the same problem, especially with music videos, like this youtube video "V9PVRfjEBTI"

[matsd88]

The itag video 18 stopped returning

[hileo]

The itag video 18 stopped returning

How to solve this problem? Thank you

[alexeichhorn]

For some videos, YouTube has increased protection. Looks like your videos are affected. This just means that it sometimes gets fewer streams back. I guess you still get streams back?
Generally, I wouldn't advise you to filter streams by itag and rather filter them by property. ITags come and go - very inconsistent on the YouTube side.

[hileo]

For some videos, YouTube has increased protection. Looks like your videos are affected. This just means that it sometimes gets fewer streams back. I guess you still get streams back? Generally, I wouldn't advise you to filter streams by itag and rather filter them by property. ITags come and go - very inconsistent on the YouTube side.

This problem occurs in almost all music videos. Please help me solve it. Thank you.

[matsd88]

For some videos, YouTube has increased protection. Looks like your videos are affected. This just means that it sometimes gets fewer streams back. I guess you still get streams back?

Generally, I wouldn't advise you to filter streams by itag and rather filter them by property. ITags come and go - very inconsistent on the YouTube side.

Thanks, seems like all combined video/audio urls are not returning even when using .filterVideoAndAudio()
main yt-dlp project still returning those links, wonder if adjusting clients helps.

[alexeichhorn]

Does yt-dlp actually return streaming links or does it just download the videos? - which it does by downloading video and audio separately and then combining them afterwards.
In my experience, YouTube is slowly removing these combined streams - also in yt-dlp. That's why I started to find a solution by also combining the video and audio streams at playback time. You can checkout a working implementation in feature/player-item.

[meirinberg]

I believe I am also experiencing this issue. It's happening on all of the videos I try. The streams returned are either audio-only or video-only. This was not a problem for me until this morning. I was able to combine the audio and video streams locally but it seems to take longer to load due to the added overhead of the merging process. Is there a more efficient method? I'd imagine that YouTube itself doesn't combine streams locally for playback to occur?

[alexeichhorn]

@meirinberg I think YouTube slowly moves to separate streams. Depending on where you are located and which video you are watching, you experience this earlier or later.
But right now, it's true that it takes much longer if you want to merge it just-in-time. This is mostly due to the AVKit APIs that I'm using, which need to have many metadata preloaded before returning the actual AVPlayerItem.
Maybe I can figure out ways to make this more efficient and faster. Feel free to look at the code and experiment with it if you have experience with AVKit.

[meirinberg]

Thank you @alexeichhorn.

[hoangnam714]

hello @alexeichhorn your way is quite reasonable but I am facing a big problem, the video length is not accurate to reality if i use avplayer.currentItem.duration , the duration of both video and audio streams separately are doubled, is there any solution for this

[alexeichhorn]

@hoangnam714 Is the video duration correctly reflected in the playback bar? Because I especially fixed this issue in commit f3126a6, but it might not apply to this property for some weird reason.