• AnyStream is having some DRM issues currently, Netflix is not available in HD for the time being.
    Situations like this will always happen with AnyStream: streaming providers are continuously improving their countermeasures while we try to catch up, it's an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. Please be patient and don't flood our support or forum with requests, we are working on it 24/7 to get it resolved. Thank you.

[AMZ] - Audio Cutoffs [1061]

Ch3vr0n

Translator NL
Thread Starter
Joined
Sep 27, 2009
Messages
24,317
Likes
3,531
I've seen a few posts on this across various topics but i don't think there's been a specific topic for it. Been trying to reproduce it to no avail, until now. Was able to confirm the behavior using AS 1061 on Prime US, with Chicago Med S01E03. Progress bar jumps from 98% to complete, and the last 20 seconds i'd say lack audio. For me it's not such a big deal as for that episode we're well into the outro credits then.

Log attached. Will try more

** edit ** consecutive episode 4 & 5 don't have that problem. For the moment specific to that episode. Though maybe it'll offer a clue
 

Attachments

  • AnyStream_1.0.6.1-ChicagoMed-S01E03.astlog
    122.3 KB · Views: 3
Last edited:
I've seen a few posts on this across various topics but i don't think there's been a specific topic for it.

https://forum.redfox.bz/threads/1-0-5-0-still-truncates-audio-on-some-episodes.79572/

I can confirm that the problem is still there in version 1.0.6.1.

It happens every time with some specific episodes, both on Amazon Prime and Netflix. So I've made a habit of opening the video properties in Media Player Classic HC and checking the length of the video and audio tracks. If the difference is more than a couple of seconds, I make a note to re-download that episode once the bug has been fixed.

As you can see below, the soundtrack for Chicago Med s01e03 is 41:07 while the video is 41:38, a difference of 31 seconds!

(In some cases Netflix has very long silent end credits for many different languages. In those cases, only silence may be chopped off so you won't notice it by just playing the episodes. But the bug is still there, and can be seen by examining the properties of the file.)

General
Complete name : C:\Users\Mollenoh\Videos\AnyStream\Chicago Med - s01e03 - Fallback.mp4
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media
Codec ID : isom (isom/iso2/avc1/mp41/iso6/piff)
File size : 3.78 GiB
Duration : 41 min 38 s
Overall bit rate : 13.0 Mb/s
Movie name : Fallback
Encoded date : UTC 2020-11-09 07:37:41
Tagged date : UTC 2020-11-09 07:37:41
Comment : When Dr. Connor Rhodes (Colin Donnell) takes the case of a close family friend who's been impaled by glass shards, he's reunited with his sister, Claire Rhodes (guest start Christina Brucato), and forced to confront his past.

Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4
Format settings : CABAC / 4 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, Reference fra : 4 frames
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 41 min 38 s
Bit rate : 12.4 Mb/s
Maximum bit rate : 23.7 Mb/s
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 24.000 FPS
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.249
Stream size : 3.60 GiB (95%)
Encoded date : UTC 2020-11-09 07:37:41
Tagged date : UTC 2020-11-09 07:37:41
Color range : Limited
Color primaries : BT.709
Transfer characteristics : BT.709
Matrix coefficients : BT.709
Codec configuration box : avcC

Audio
ID : 2
Format : E-AC-3
Format/Info : Enhanced AC-3
Commercial name : Dolby Digital Plus
Codec ID : ec-3
Duration : 41 min 7 s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 640 kb/s
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Channel layout : L R C LFE Ls Rs
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 188 MiB (5%)
Language : English
Service kind : Complete Main
Encoded date : UTC 2020-11-09 07:37:41
Tagged date : UTC 2020-11-09 07:37:41
 
@Mollenoh I'd appreciate if you share the list of problematic titles. I assume not all of them are available in my region, but I need some "meat" to work with. Otherwise, it would be more of a guess game.
 
@Mollenoh I'd appreciate if you share the list of problematic titles. I assume not all of them are available in my region, but I need some "meat" to work with. Otherwise, it would be more of a guess game.

Sure.

On Amazon Prime:
Mortified season 1 episodes 1, 8 and 11
Chicago Med season 1 episode 3
The Irish Mob season 1 episode 1

On Netflix:
Mako Mermaids season 1 episodes 9** and 13**, season 2 episode 12, season 4 episode 8**
The Worst Witch season 4 episode 13**
Bad Education season 3 episode 1
The Barrier (La valla) season 1 episodes 3 and 4

** Only cuts off silence at the end. You'll have to examine the file to see that the audio is significantly shorter than the video.
 
Last edited:
Sure.

Chicago Med
season 1 episode 3

I just checked the UK side of things, and it's OK (container: 00:41:38.048, video: 00:41:37.996, audio: 00:41:38.048), so could be server specific, but I am still on 1060.
 
Worth a try. Though tbh in this case for that chicago med episode i'm not going to stress over it. The credits have been rolling for a while then and i don't think anyone actually reads those. I sure don't.
 
Worth a try. Though tbh in this case for that chicago med episode i'm not going to stress over it. The credits have been rolling for a while then and i don't think anyone actually reads those. I sure don't.

I don't care so much about reading the end credits either, but I often let the episodes play to the very end just to listen to the music. If a show and its music are good, it brings you into the mood of that show. If the music suddenly stops before the end, it causes a brutal "awakening" that destroys lots of that "magic".

The important thing is that there's apparently a bug here that will affect several episodes on both Amazon Prime and Netflix, who knows how many? It's likely that there are many more than the few you and I have found. There's nothing apparently wrong when playing the episodes on-line without downloading them.
 
It's actually fairly trivial to check if you have any tool that could get track durations out of containers. In case of mediainfo, for example, just check that |Video;%Duration% - Audio;%Duration%| <= 5000ms let's say...
 
Thanks for the info. Checking.

Since as you're presumably walking through MP4 boxes in post-processing anyway, perhaps you could keep a tally of times and check the totals are within a tolerance of, say, 5 seconds? This would at least flag downloads are have one track way shorter than another. :)

I've written a quick shell script (should work in any flavour of UNIX or WSL2) that checks if video and audio tracks are within a specified tolerance, if people want I'd happily post it.
 
Last edited:
Progress bar jumps from 98% to complete, and the last 20 seconds i'd say lack audio.
I'm 100% shooting in the dark here but I was having a similar issue even prior to AS, some episodes would autostart the next episode in line before the current episode was finished (sometimes skipping more than 2 minutes). It only happened with a handful of episodes but it was really irratating. I turned off "auto start next episode" and hasn't happened since. Again, this was only a handful of episodes out of thousands so it must be something related to how the episode was setup on their end. It can't hurt to give it a try, if you have auto play currently enabled.
 
There is no Autoplay in AnyStream. The source file itself is lacking audio in the last 20 seconds.

Playback method can't play audio, if the audio track itself is shorter than the video.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk
 
@Prospere, so I did some experimenting with 'flix, having found a title that is consistently short, and it seems DD+/AAC makes no difference either (actually, one is worse!)

Code:
find . -name \*mp4 -exec ~/as_chk  5 {} \;
./lab/DDP/title.mp4: audio shorter than container by ~19 seconds [c|v|a = 1658120|1658120|1639008]
./lab/AAC/title.mp4: audio shorter than container by ~27 seconds [c|v|a = 1658120|1658120|1630336]

(c)ontainer, (v)ideo, and (a)udio times are in milliseconds; and it's not that the container is too long, the audio does cut out, I checked :)
 

Attachments

  • title.astlog
    77.2 KB · Views: 3
@Prospere, so I did some experimenting with 'flix, having found a title that is consistently short, and it seems DD+/AAC makes no difference either (actually, one is worse!)

Code:
find . -name \*mp4 -exec ~/as_chk  5 {} \;
./lab/DDP/title.mp4: audio shorter than container by ~19 seconds [c|v|a = 1658120|1658120|1639008]
./lab/AAC/title.mp4: audio shorter than container by ~27 seconds [c|v|a = 1658120|1658120|1630336]

(c)ontainer, (v)ideo, and (a)udio times are in milliseconds; and it's not that the container is too long, the audio does cut out, I checked :)

Just the log is enough. It clearly shows the problem happening, it's just that we are trying to locate the root of it.
 
Just the log is enough. It clearly shows the problem happening, it's just that we are trying to locate the root of it.


Don't know if it's relevant at all: the video is fetched from one of the "motherships" whereas the audio is fetched from ISP's cache :)
 
Just the log is enough. It clearly shows the problem happening, it's just that we are trying to locate the root of it.
Enclosed log shows download of Cat Ballou via IMDB channel. Audio is truncated by more that 1 minute.
 

Attachments

  • AnyStream_1.0.6.1_Cat_Ballou.astlog
    682.5 KB · Views: 0
I have had this problem occur also. For me it stems from the fact that I have spectrum cable and for the past six months or so the internet drops for a few seconds to minutes far too much. When the connections drops for a few seconds in the middle of a download, there seems to be no problem with the download, I figure a caching affect is the reason. Now if the drop flows into the minutes, then Anystream goes into post processing of a truncated download. If the drop of connection happens near the end of an download, around the 98% mark, even for a few seconds, Anystream goes into a post processing truncated download, usually sacrificing only the audio. Also on a side note, as for me monitoring my connection as Anystream runs, I have noticed that Anystream seems to force my connection monitor to report that the connection is dropping sporadically during some downloads. When in actuality no drop has occurred according to the modem logs. So it may be wise to note to users that if internet connections drop a lot even for seconds it may affect downloads in ways not clearly noticable.
 
I don’t think random internet drops are the problem, because it’s completely repeatable - the same vid always loses the same amount of audio at the end.
 
Back
Top