Since it is radio silence from the powers that be, i will continue to point out why being able to pick the season or episode to scan is the only way to address the problems of the current way.
I am not sure if they just want to stick to their guns and not want to make it seem the competitor had it right all along but, if it is, that is very bad business.
Anyway, here is the story of downloading all 4 seasons Halt and Catch Fire from APV with StreamFab v6.1.2.5.
I wasted a bunch of download credits by first getting all seasons, then Season 4 in 1 scan, and Season 4 again by scanning individual episodes.
The individual episodes gave the best results as expected because there is no guess work by StreamFab. Simply download what i choose.
All 4 Seasons at Once
Selecting Season 1 within StreamFab, i was able to get H265 and 5.1 Audio for the pop-up. Selected the 5000 kbps bitrate.
The result was the usual wild variations in bitrate but also, 2 episodes of Season 3 downloaded in H264 at the highest bitrate available. Season 4 was entirely in H264.
So we have 3 problems here:
- H264 only episodes from Season 3 are downloaded at the highest bitrate.
- H265 episodes without the 5000 kbps bitrate get downloaded at 9000 kbps instead of the closest bitrate available which is 4000 kbps.
- The entirety of Season 4 is in H264. I found that hard to believe.
Being able to scan individual episodes, i would have known those 2 episodes didn't have a H265 version and i could have picked a more appropriate bitrate for my needs. I could have also done the same for Season 4. Lastly, I could have picked 4000 kbps for anything that didn't have 5000 kbps.
Season 4 OnlySince i didn't buy the fact that the whole season was in H264, i tried scanning just season 4. Because my APV settings are configured to download in H265, i got this pop-up:
So i decided to try scanning episode 10. The only way to do that is to go to APV in a regular browser, searching for the show/season, and right-clicking on the episode and copying the link to the clipboard. StreamFab needs to be configured to monitor the clipboard.
After StreamFab scanned episode 10, i got this pop-up:
I chose the 5000 kbps and selected all episodes. The resulting downloads looked like this:
The problems here are:
- H264 Bitrate is too high.
- H265 episodes without 5000 kbps are downloaded at 9000 kbps instead of 4000 kbps.
- Some episodes' audio are missing the English language tag.
The first 2 are because of the "logic". It's already been proven that they cannot predict what i will want so why not give is the power to just pick what i want for each episode???
Last one
looks like a bug to me.
Season 4 Individual EpisodesThe last thing i did was to scan each individual episode and get the bitrates i actually wanted. This took a long time because there was a lot of back and forth between my browser and StreamFab and of course, the enumeration of all seasons each of the 10 times i did this.
The final folder looks like this:
This, to me, is the best option. Yes, Amazon's annoying bitrate variations are not ideal but, this way, i get something somewhat consistent.
Lastly, i think Amazon has changed all their bitrate profiles so the 15k, 8k, 4k for H264 and 9k, 5k, 2k for H265 are inaccurate. Is there no way to get the
actual video bitrate?
