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Why won’t my downloaded VOD play?

A downloaded VOD may not play if its video segments were joined together without rebuilding the file’s container information. This can happen when a stream is made from many small segments, or when you try to combine the .ts or .mp4 files yourself.

The good news: you can often fix the file without downloading it again. Use FFmpeg to repackage the video into a standard MP4 file. This does not re-encode the video, so it should not reduce its quality.

Quick fix: repackage the video with FFmpeg

  1. Make sure you have FFmpeg installed. If you’re not sure, see the installation instructions below.
  2. Open Terminal on macOS or PowerShell on Windows.
  3. Copy the command for your computer, replacing the example input and output paths with the paths to your files.
  4. Press Enter and wait for FFmpeg to finish. It will create a new fixed file and leave your original file unchanged.

macOS

ffmpeg -i "/Users/me/Downloads/video.ts" -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc "/Users/me/Downloads/video-fixed.mp4"

Windows

ffmpeg -i "C:\Users\YourName\Downloads\video.ts" -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc "C:\Users\YourName\Downloads\video-fixed.mp4"

In these examples, change video.ts to the name of your downloaded file. The fixed file will be saved as video-fixed.mp4 in the same folder. You can choose a different output name, but keep the .mp4 extension.

Why does this happen?

A VOD downloader may save a stream as many separate video segments and then combine them into one download. Simply joining segments as raw bytes can leave out or damage information that a media player needs to read the file correctly. FFmpeg rebuilds the container while copying the audio and video streams, rather than converting them.

Install FFmpeg

If your computer says that ffmpeg is not recognized or the command cannot be found, install FFmpeg first.

macOS

If you already use Homebrew, open Terminal and run:

brew install ffmpeg

If Homebrew is not installed, follow the instructions on the Homebrew website, then run the command above. To check that FFmpeg is ready, run:

ffmpeg -version

Windows

These steps use Chocolatey, a Windows package manager.

  1. Open PowerShell as Administrator. For example, right-click Start and choose Windows Terminal (Admin) or PowerShell (Admin).
  2. Install FFmpeg:
choco install ffmpeg -y
  1. Close and reopen PowerShell, then check the installation:
ffmpeg -version

If it still doesn’t work

  • “No such file or directory” or “file not found”: Check that the input path and filename are correct. You can drag the file into Terminal or PowerShell to insert its path, then put quotation marks around the full path.
  • “ffmpeg” is not recognized or command not found: Install FFmpeg, then close and reopen your command window before trying again.
  • The command finishes, but the new file still won’t play: Confirm that you opened the new video-fixed.mp4, not the original file. If it still fails, the download may be incomplete or the file may use a different format; try downloading it again and contact support with the exact error message.

Keep the original download until you’ve confirmed that the fixed MP4 plays correctly.

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