Help me test my latest project

Adz

Adz

Adz

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
10,277
Location
Berkshire
Firstly, note to mods, I'm hoping this is ok as for now it's just a proof of concept, personal challenge, testbed for ideas however there is a possibility it may become a commercial project in the future.

I'm really looking for some kind people to bombard the system with files (preferably videos - especially windows media and quicktime), to report any bugs and to give general feedback on how the system works.

The site currently represents around 10 hours work including configuring the server from scratch - it's running on PHP5 and MySQL 5. I'd say it's around 10% complete but I'm itching to get some feedback, hence this thread. Tomorrow I'll be adding a direct download link for the original unmolested file to the 'view' page. Eventually users will be able to sign up to track, delete, modify their files, upload by FTP, etc, etc.

Without further ado, I present www.filevend.com :).
 
Aha, a file upload site that'll convert videos to frindly Flash :)

I looked into that Flash script and never realised Youtube et al simply used a rehashed version of it :D
 
Adz said:
What you see on the site is just a free frontend player - http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player

Videos are converted with ffmpeg.
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Yup:

Some examples of other websites that use the script are the YouTube and Blip videosharing services, the Kutti MC videoclip, the FlipClips and Nintendo WII websites and AlGore.org.
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FFmpeg seemed to take my wmv file with no problems. I don't have any oddly-encoded video around to test with, unfortunately :(
 
I've only got one .wmv that is currently won't convert (after a good hour playing with different versions) which I'm now going to upload to youtube to see if they know something I don't ;).
 
They both seem ok to me. I should point out that it can take anything upto 5 minutes for an uploaded video to be viewable.

Is anyone finding the videos don't play in IE? I can only recreate the issue on one machine at the moment.

Thanks to everyone who has uploaded :).
 
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If you try to play the video as soon as you upload it, it'll probably stop half way through or not play at all. The videos are encoded in the background and can take a good few minutes to complete. Tomorrow I'll add something to stop users visiting before the videos are ready :).
 
Garbage Day?!. AVI ~2MB in DivX4 (I think). Seems to work fine, but no response once the file was uploaded, despite waiting for a while. The player's buffer bar was filled (all black), but nothing played. Re-opening the link cured it.
/edit - refuses to play in IE6/Win2K.

Oh, and remember to escape user-input ;). N.B Unless you have javascript disabled, this will require you to forcibly close down your browser (infinite alert() loop).
 
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Do you mean there was no confirmation screen? Perhaps it timed out (I'll look into that) but if you didn't get the confirmation screen, where did you get the URL from?

It didn't even occur to me to escape user input since the files aren't publically browsable (yet!). I'll add that to the ever growing list.

Thanks :).

I'm in the DC later this evening so I can test it myself with some properly large files. It gets a bit tedious over ADSL ;).
 
Adz said:
Do you mean there was no confirmation screen? Perhaps it timed out (I'll look into that) but if you didn't get the confirmation screen, where did you get the URL from?
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No, I mean the actual player was unresponsive. Seems I had to reload the page in order for it to start playing (or perhaps I just happened to reload at the point it completed encoding).

I imagine the alert box about long upload times won't be in the final version, but it's a bit misleading - it might not be obvious whether you should click it immediately or not for the upload to proceed. Some users may wait for it to close down, assuming it to be akin to a progress notification box (think file-transfer in windows).

Escaping input should be a natural reflex action when coding a web app :D.
 
I've already removed that :).

The current upload page is only temporary. On another site I developed which relies heavily on large file uploads I implemented a 3rd party Java frontend which made form posts to the server. This gave a nice file browser, queueing system and progress bar but was very 'clunky'. I'm going to try to create/purchase/steal ;) something in flash this time round offering the plain HTML upload as a backup.
 
Adz said:
I'm in the DC later this evening so I can test it myself with some properly large files. It gets a bit tedious over ADSL ;).
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The two vids I uploaded were from our server.

It certainly doesn't mind a fast upload. :)

The videos are Gibbo's mustang testing or something. I hosted them for a bit.
 
Lots more work done today. I think I've addressed all of the issues raised in this thread so far. Some of the files on the 'browse' page are being re-encoded and thumbnailed in the background so might not be available for an hour or so.

More uploads would be appreciated if anyone has the time - the more obscure the better. I've got a surprisingly limited collection of video files.

Thanks everyone :).
 
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