Detector Troubleshot
If you're not sure what issue you're having, or can't resolve it, please send us feedback via email.
1. Took Too Long to Detect
When visiting websites like YouTube or Vimeo, or when videos from these websites are embedded in the web page, it usually takes a long time for WhaleDown to detect the video.
The video discovery process usually takes about a minute. Sometimes users are mistaken for not being able to detect videos.
There is currently no good solution, so please wait patiently for the detection to be completed.
2. Too Many Videos/Audios Detected
2.1 Video Ads
Some pages include lots of video ads. The videos shown in these ads will also be discovered by the detector. This caused the Detector to be flooded with lots of useless ads' links.
If you're using the desktop version of WhaleDown, you can install an ad-blocking extension for your browser. For example, the famous Chrome extension - AdBlock.
2.2 Big Video/Auido Segments
Many video websites now use segmented video and audio transmission. These segments usually can't be played alone, and sometimes even encrypted.
When the segments are large, WhaleDown usually thinks they are normal videos and adds them to the list. The video segments in Detector are causing interference to users.
For video segments under 10MB, you can adjust the Small files filter in Detector Settings to filter them.
Please give us feedback on some video sites that use very large video segments. We will add custom filtering rules of these sites.
2.3 Dynamic URLs
Some video site players regularly refresh video links. These links usually point to the same video, but they can have minor differences (such as timestamps).
For the web player, it ignores duplicate links or plays new links smoothly. However, this caused the Detector to detect a large number of duplicate video links.
In response to this problem, WhaleDown already has some built-in filtering rules. But this is limited to some video sites.
If this happens to you, please give us feedback. We'll be customizing new filtering rules for these video sites.
3. No Video/Audio Detected
3.1 Filtered as Small Files
WhaleDown has some built-in rules for filtering small ads/segments videos. However, if the video you're playing is indeed a very small video, it may be mistakenly filtered out. This can mislead users into thinking that the video was not detected.
If the video has already been filtered, you can find
in the top bar of Detector. Once you click on it and go to the Filtered view, you'll find the filtered little video in the list below.Additionally, you can turn off the Small files filter in Detector Settings to detect all small videos.
3.2 Customized Transport Protocols
Some video websites such as Facebook usually use customized video transmission protocols instead of common HLS (m3u8) or DASH (mpd). WhaleDown already has built-in support for websites like YouTube and Vimeo. Other websites, such as Netflix, are not supported.
We don't have a good solution to this problem. However, we can try the deeply customized code to detect and download these videos. This is obviously very difficult and takes up a lot of our development time.
If this happens to you, please give us feedback. However, due to resource limitations, we can only try to support some important video sites.
3.3 WireGuard VPN
When users use WireGuard or WireGuard-based VPNs, WhaleDown may not be able to detect videos from YouTube or other websites.
When using WireGuard VPN, our developer tests revealed that this issue was only experienced when visiting certain video sites. We don't know the cause of this issue yet.
Please use an IPsec-based or any other type of VPN.
4. Low Video Resolution
If the player plays a lower resolution video by default, the detected video is also low resolution. Sometimes web players request video links in multiple resolutions at the same time, and dynamically select which one to play based on network conditions.
What the detector detects is usually a link to a video that is playing on a web page. In above case, multiple video links are usually detected. Unfortunately, we're unable to label videos in resolution based on links.
If the video player on the web page offers multiple resolution options, please switch to HD resolution manually. Then, the detector will detect a high-resolution video link.
5. Not Contain Sound
Users will find that after downloading some videos, there is no sound when playing them. Or sometimes the other way around, only audio but no images.
This is usually due to video sites streaming video/audio separately. HLS and DASH protocols both support video and audio transmission separately.
The document "No Audio" describes this issue in detail and how to deal with it.