Video File Size/Length?

[jkantor]

I'm trying to figure out just what videos I can play.

Most of the shorter files (under 5min) I've tried play, but none of
the longer ones will. Most of the time I get "This movie cannot be
played" almost instantly. Sometimes it just shows a white Q screen and
nothing ever loads. (I've tested this using wifi on my end.)

I know you can't possibly allow infinite amounts of bandwidth, but
what are the guidelines?


As a minor point - if a category has no entries, it says "No Songs!"
"No Media" would be a more appropriate general message.

[woo]

> I'm trying to figure out just what videos I can play.

I assume you saw this other related post:

http://groups.google.com/group/ootunes/browse_thread/thread/f752b69238fa7406

>
> Most of the shorter files (under 5min) I've tried play, but none of
> the longer ones will. Most of the time I get "This movie cannot be
> played" almost instantly. Sometimes it just shows a white Q screen and
> nothing ever loads. (I've tested this using wifi on my end.)

this is typically 1 of 2 things.
1) the bandwidth is simply not sufficient to play back over the
network connections (either upload speed from your computer running
ooTunes or download speed on whatever connection you are using on the
iPhone/iPod Touch, or both).
2) The movies need to have their metadata at the very beginning of the
file, otherwise the the whole movie must be downloaded before
streaming can begin, and longer movies simply timeout before the whole
thing is downloaded.

Let me know if one of those happens to be the case.

>
> I know you can't possibly allow infinite amounts of bandwidth, but
> what are the guidelines?

One of the cool things about ooTunes (for both me and you, at least in
theory) is that the only limiting bandwidth is on your own up/down
connection from your server and your client. It is streamed directly
from your computer to your device, our server is only used for
connecting the two up.

>
> As a minor point - if a category has no entries, it says "No Songs!"
> "No Media" would be a more appropriate general message.

Good suggestions, I hate the word "media" in this context (cause it
sounds really funny to anyone but a techie), but "No Tracks" or "No
Items" or even a specific message based on the type of playlist ("no
Videos") would indeed be better, I'll add this to my todos. Thanks!

[jkantor]

I did see the other post and checked to make sure I was accessing
videos that I have already run on the iPhone without any problem. All
the videos I've tried are already loaded on my iPhone and run fine. I
also made sure that I have the latest version of VLC player and that I
rebooted both my machine and iPhone. (That fixed some early problems I
had.)

I was testing this out using wifi sitting in front of my desktop and
router. I can't see how I could get any more bandwidth than that.

As for metadata, I don't know how I'd tell that - or how I'd fix it.
Most of these videos were transcoded using Videora.

What I've found is that even the short videos don't always play - but
will if I try them a couple of times.

They also don't buffer very well when I've tried them elsewhere (on
3G). I'd be happier waiting longer for playback to start rather than
having it stop multiple times.

In fact, in most cases I'd be happy with waiting for the entire video
to upload and then playing it locally (through the browser) rather
than having it actually stream. Is being able to upload files and then
access them a possibility?