PSA: Your Script May Not Match Depending on how your video was Downloaded - Heres How To Avoid Issues

After quite a bit of research, it has been discovered that:

  • A script can be perfectly matched on your end, but it may not line up for others depending on their video source, even if it appears to be the exact same video with similar runtime and frame rate.

This holds for mainly 2D videos where there can be multiple sources to obtain the same video.

To understand and help others ensure they are having a good matched script experience and for consistency and avoiding frustration, here are my recommendations:

  • DO try to make scripts or playback videos using the Original (Free or Paid) Source, best through Direct downloadable clickable links on the video’s site.

  • AVOID using the program/extension “DownloadHelper” (https://www.downloadhelper.net/)
    It appears this app only offers a type of ‘screen recording’ and introduces a choppiness/lag that has been confirmed to have issues with matching scripts

  • AVOID using any other Downloader program option that grabs or records indirect “HLS online streams” or “HTTP Live Streaming” of the video (unsure if this applies to all downloaders, but its safe to avoid)

Downloaders that record HLS or HTTP Live streams or don’t offer direct links to the originals source introduce a sort of frame rate drift which isn’t more noticeable until about halfway through the video, where the script will no longer line up (can be up to 200ms off), for not fully understood reasons.

Its a prelliminary finding and there may be issues with other methods, and please post here if you do find any other issues, but so far this is a confirmed issue and should help with scripting and playback issues.

Just added a poll which you can vote on:
https://discuss.eroscripts.com/t/do-you-use-a-video-downloader-program-for-scripting-or-for-playback-poll/5412/2

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I have used a few different download methods and have had that issue from time to time. if you are going to do it using an online download site “tube offline” works really well I’ve found for tons of video sites. I’ve never had an issue with it if people need to find a new way to download some videos!

yup I’ve had no issues with tube offline and similar sites (when they work). They just give you a direct link to the video source from the streaming site.

@Realcumber thanks for investigating this.
After a while (let’s say a month or two) do you think we should move this over to #howto?

realizes that 90% of the videos he has downloaded have been with DWH Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

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not disputing as clearly some are having issues-

but I’ve never had one issue downloading via DWH and syncs.

@hugecat - yes, feel free to move this over to whichever forum you think its best later on - i think its good to let people know for a bit first

@scibbles + @tier01 - DWH is the most popular extension so good chance alot are using it, but it has a couplew ways of downloading a video (with or without companion app) so you may or may not experience sync issues or you may also not be noticing - especially since the this seems to affect longer scripts over 8 minutes, and usually in the latter half of a script.

But 100% I have been able to see firsthand differences found comparing the same scripts and videos side by side and frame by frame using different downloaders and is likely more noticeable in higher accurately playing toys like the Handy and OSR2

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How does one download a script from here and steam the vid from slr and get it to work? What’s the titling system I need to be replicated. Is the filename found somewhere that I need rename my funscript

It does not work like that. You also have to download the video and then play it locally or via dlna. You can only stream funscripts that you bought from slr.

Not neccesarly. In the SLR interactive guide there is a part that says that you can stream video with local scripts:

(For Streaming Video with a local script - Please put a script into /Interactive folder with video ID in filename like 15447.funscript for https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/hard-sell-15447 (also shown in player panel in SLR app)

You can get that number by looking at url.

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Ah, ok, thanks! I didn’t know that.

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Yes! Perfect thank you!

@sterfry95 @hugecat or just https://yt-dl.org :wink:

Oh man that’s a bummer - I’ve been downloading streaming videos using HLS as away to avoid the dreaded ‘This video was removed in response to a DMCA request’

I wonder if the drift is introduced evenly throughout the video, or in little chunks randomly. If it was nice and even then it should be possible to write an app to re-encode the video adding / removing a few frames to keep the video in sync to a known ‘true’ video length…

@defucilis - Its both - some scripts just need a full script couple frames over, others need shifts every couple of minutes

I think it has to do with depending if your internet connection smoothly plays the video at the time of download with or without lag, but thats just my guess for the HLS stream captures

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Good advice ty

How should I download then? I was going to use JDownloader.

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I’ve been using VideoDownloadHelper too, and I’m almost finished scripting a long video that I was going to share :confused: Will share it amyway, with a note that I used VDH, I suppose.

Does anyone have more details about the symptoms of this? Choppiness/lag is mentioned, but beyond that, it’s basically “they don’t match”.

The choppiness issue with VideoDownloadHelper is probably that it can download from a streaming source (HLS or similar), rather than downloading actual files.

(As Realcucumber hinted) streaming sources will drop frames if the network connection can’t fully keep up (or just has a temporary communications glItch).

The main cause of that would be overloading your network connection, like starting the download in VDH and then also watching it, doubling network traffic, or maybr even starting 4 parallel video downloads while watching videos and running bittorrent.

In theory the saved video should have timing information and so this shouldn’t matter, but maybe something’s not quite right in the saving, or the playing of that video with dropped frames and/or bad timecode.

It might be a usage error, too. VideoDownloadHelper has a lot of complex options, and its UI is basically terrible. Could be that people are transcoding to different file formats without meaning to. Again, this “shouldn’t” matter if the timing info is saved properly and the player plays it properly, but maybe the reality is a bit different.

I always download the .ts file from places like pornhub. If you use inspect and then look at network it will be a link like this https://ev-h.phncdn.com/hls/videos/201910/14/254761491/,200207_1949_1080P_4000K,200207_1949_720P_4000K,200207_1949_480P_2000K,200207_1949_240P_1000K,_254761491.mp4.urlset/index-f1-v1-a1.m3u8?validfrom=1629264305&validto=1629271505&ipa=XX.XX.XX.XX&hdl=-1&hash=%2XXXXA9EITTKuXXXr2cpSHBXXX%3D

Programs like IDM (internet download manager) which is paid, or Jdownloader which is free download the .ts which is the complete file with no HLS getting in the way on on the fly re-encoding. Then you use ffmpeg to reencode. This has been perfect 99% of the time.

I have a folder I do conversions in, just need a copy of ffmpeg.exe in that folder and paste the stuff below in to notepad and save as .bat

ECHO OFF
for %%a in (“*.ts”) do (
ffmpeg -i “%%a” -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc “%%~na.mp4”
del “%%~na.ts”
)
cls
ECHO.
ECHO Job done!
ECHO.
pause

FYI, that deletes the original file, so if you don’t want that change the .ts in the "del “%%~na.ts” line to ‘no’ or w,e

Maybe people with more ffmpeg experience will drop a better option, but this has worked well for me and time always matches.

I’m going to try this- thanks.

I use IDM and normally I’ve found I just have to set the delay to -250ms and it matches up. Sometimes it “catches up” towards the end of the video and I’ll readjust it to 0ms.

EDIT: I got a bunch of errors for missing DLL files :confused: