Amazon The Deer Hunter - Amazon

[drcos]

Downloads at 1080p, appears to download the whole 3h 3m movie, but processing seems longer than normal, and output video file is truncated to 52mins (H265) or 49 mins (H264).
Is this related to the DRM problems?

[Chameleon]

No, it's being re-encoded. It's downloaded at a much lower resolution and then re-encoded. Yes, it's related to the DRM, it's the poor man's way of attaining 1080p. The picture is degraded.

[wyhtmgm]

Slow processing suggests that it's being re-encoded, but that doesn't explain why the length is truncated. What version of StreamFab?

[drcos]

Version is 6.1.7.0

[wyhtmgm]

I'm using the 6.1.7.1 beta, but I didn't realize the movie you're trying to download isn't free, so I can't try it.

[drcos]

With 6.1.7.3, the video file is up to 1h 29m (of 3h 3m).
Not just this movie, also 'Night of the Comet' re-encodes without the last 15 minutes or so.
May try the 'test version' soon.

[drcos]

Update: The 6.1.6.9 'test version' works with both mentioned movies.

[JeffDavis]

3 hours and 3 minutes is 263,520 frames of 1920x1080 video that StreamFab is trying to re-encode on the fly as H.264 video. It's video that originated as film shot in 1977/78, hence full of film grain, noise, and dirt that would be a challenge for a dedicated video encoder, which StreamFab is not. At some point an exception occurs and the re-encode terminates abnormally.

[JeffDavis]

I recently ripped the 4K Blu-ray of Deer Hunter and used Handbrake to re-encode it as 1080p and 2160p MKV files. The 1080p encode took 6.66 hours. The 2160p encode took 30.83 hours. These were H.265 encodes, which takes longer than the H.264 that StreamFab performs. My circa 2017 PC has a Core i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz. Handbrake is designed to do encoding of unencrypted audio/video files and nothing else. StreamFab is trying to do the same thing on the fly while interfacing with the Widevine DLL, the Amazon licensing server and the Amazon video file server. This re-encoding is never going to be a satisfactory solution. They need to fix the DRM.

[drcos]

I was unaware that this is why the problem occurred, or why new movies on Amazon were taking so long in the 'processing' stage.
6.1.6.9 did work, and the output looks fine. Not amazing, but fine. Curious as to why the 'old' test version works where the latest release version does not.