FreeTubeApp
[Bug]: Specific video throws Error: This video is unavailable
Guidelines
- [x] I have encountered this bug in the latest release of FreeTube.
- [x] I have encountered this bug in the official downloads of FreeTube.
- [x] I have searched the issue tracker for open and closed issues that are similar to the bug report I want to file, without success.
- [x] I have searched the documentation for information that matches the description of the bug I want to file, without success.
- [x] This issue contains only one bug.
- [x] I have read and agree to follow the rules.
Describe the bug
The new update fixed the videos not loading bug... for two days. While it isn't showing up all of the time, given the trend of the last version, it will probably only get more common over time
Expected Behavior
Issue Labels
content not loading
FreeTube Version
v0.23.8 Beta
Operating System Version
Windows 10
Installation Method
.exe
Primary API used
Local API
Last Known Working FreeTube Version (If Any)
No response
Additional Information
No response
Nightly Build
- [ ] I have encountered this bug in the latest nightly build.
Okay, I looked into a bunch of other videos. Weirdly, the only one I can reliably replicate it with is the Mother's Basement video "The Problem with Isekai" No idea what that's about
Video URL for future reference: https://youtu.be/1kU-ULTs-vQ
Okay so I know why it is happening for that one specific video and it turns out it is caused by one of the workarounds we are using. As the YouTube desktop website has switched to SABR and our SABR implementation is still work-in-progress, FreeTube requests the desktop website to get all the metadata and then requests the mobile website to get the streaming URLs. YouTube's mobile website doesn't have a quality selector so instead they pick the audio track on the server side based on the page language and only return that one in the response, which because we were always requesting the page in English meant that we often got the auto-dubbed English audio track rather than the original one, which lots of users complained about. So I had the idea that as we have the desktop website response we can look at what the language of the original audio track is and request the page in that language, which was implemented in https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/pull/7846 which was included in 0.23.7.
For most videos that works great, but with this one the original audio track is in en-CA, so Canadian English and it seems like YouTube's server doesn't know how to handle that and returns an error instead. That is why that error only happens on that specific video.
One potential solution would be to only send the primary language rather than the region specific one, so en instead of en-CA and hope that that doesn't break any other videos...
Okay, but that begs the question then, why is it only that video? If the audio track is en-CA (because the creator is originally from Canada) why isn't the entire channel down?
Because the other videos don't have any language information on the audio tracks, so FreeTube falls back to US English which YouTube's servers have no problem with. My guess is that the uploader enabled the AI generated auto-dubbing on that video for the first time and YouTube just hasn't generated those dubbing tracks yet, so it is in a weird state of the language information already being there in the response even though it only has one audio track at the moment.
Oops disregard my previous comment, It's solved, It was user error. I had my shortcut still opening the previous beta. All fixed now.
