If you don't check if the media is undefined the media will be always undefined

I do check if media is undefined on downloadMedia() return. But the 'fetching' check doesn't make sense to me, but i don't have enough experience on this project to affirm that. I was looking for an explanation for what could happen if i remove the 'fetching' check but keep the 'error' check part. Can you clarify? I would be grateful.

Write proper steps to reproduce the bug, downloading gifs from whatsapp (which are always .mp4 if you dont know) works normally for me

I've got a very simillar problem, I tried to make a sticker bot and I consistently got the issue, where after a couple successful conversions, downloadMedia() eventually starts returning undefined. After I removed || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING' in Message.js in the downloadMedia() method, just like @leftbrasil, the issue was gone.

@gkp1 if you need code where the issue becomes apparent, you can try this code and convert media to stickers a couple times by quoting a message with a media and adding the caption "sticker":

client.on('message', async msg => {
    if (msg.body == 'sticker' || msg.body == 'Sticker') {
        if (msg.hasQuotedMsg) {
            const quoted_msg = await msg.getQuotedMessage();
            const chat = await msg.getChat();
            const chat_id = chat.id._serialized;
            const media_message = await quoted_msg.downloadMedia();
            await client.sendMessage(chat_id, media_message, { sendMediaAsSticker: true });
        }
    }
});

Hopefully someone can eventially confirm whether it's safe to remove || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING'

Your code looks right, I'm not sure if the chat Id serialized is correct tho. I believe You can use message.from instead of chat Id serialized, and it will still work for groups and private dms.

or even better, what I use is msg.reply(media, undefined, {sendMediaAsSticker:true})
( yes undefined is required there)

If you use chrome stable instead of chromium, this will also work with sending animated stickers for .mp4 and gif videos. As I said GIFs in the WhatsApp chat are just short mp4s.

https://wwebjs.dev/guide/handling-attachments.html#caveat-for-sending-videos-and-gifs

Thank you for your suggestions. Using message.from seemst to be more elegant, I just changed it for me. As for msg.reply(), I deliberately didn't use it, because I didn't want the bot to quote the message. I have no problems converting diffrent types of media to sticker, my only issue was that it would stop working after a short while and removing || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING' seemed to fix the issue for me.

Before i posted this issue, I did some research and found that might be a problem when you try to download a sticker that already have been downloaded before and/or when sending messages to myself (same number - from and to equals)

I thought the same, but I noticed, that it doesn't have to be the same media all the time for the code I sent to start failing. The 'FETCHING' thing was deffenetly the cause.

Now and then, I get a slight feeling that there are concepts in play here, that are currently beyond my understanding lol

I can confirm removing || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING' fixes it. Thanks!

It happens to me too with gif and videos, it also works by removing the fetching. I get the video and everything being able to manipulate it succesfully but I don't really like to edit the package, I would like to stay within the code that comes when updating with npm to have the latest becuase it looks like an active package that will get a lot of other features, also maintaining that code change will be really painfull.

There must be something that that line is doing, right? otherwise somebody would have sent a merge request removing that line already.

Is there any other solution to this? I tried a couple and non of them worked, I get undefined no matter what

Well, actually nobody could explain why these lines are there. Maybe we could PR this and try it out

I've got a very simillar problem, I tried to make a sticker bot and I consistently got the issue, where after a couple successful conversions, downloadMedia() eventually starts returning undefined. After I removed || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING' in Message.js in the downloadMedia() method, just like @leftbrasil, the issue was gone.

@gkp1 if you need code where the issue becomes apparent, you can try this code and convert media to stickers a couple times by quoting a message with a media and adding the caption "sticker":

client.on('message', async msg => {
    if (msg.body == 'sticker' || msg.body == 'Sticker') {
        if (msg.hasQuotedMsg) {
            const quoted_msg = await msg.getQuotedMessage();
            const chat = await msg.getChat();
            const chat_id = chat.id._serialized;
            const media_message = await quoted_msg.downloadMedia();
            await client.sendMessage(chat_id, media_message, { sendMediaAsSticker: true });
        }
    }
});

Hopefully someone can eventially confirm whether it's safe to remove || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING'

Yeah this work for me, just remove
|| msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING' in node_modules/whatsapp-web.js/src/structures/Message.js

Can someone make PR to fix this problem? Or this will make another problem?

#2491

just opened a PR to fix this

I can confirm removing || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING' fixes it. Thanks!

how did you manage to use whatsapp web.js to convert gif to sticker i have been trying this for like eternity

I can confirm removing || msg.mediaData.mediaStage === 'FETCHING' fixes it. Thanks!

Hello, may I ask if there are any new issues after deleting this line of code? Will frequent calls increase the frequency of being banned