Attachment Time-out?

Started by Grant, July 18, 2018, 01:21:05 AM

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Grant

Hi folks,
Does anyone know whether there's a time-out on uploads of attachments? I can't seem to upload videos of greater than 10mb to a new message on a forum I run. I just get the page reset back to a brand new, new topic page. If not, do you think it is a server issue (and where would I be able to change that through cPanel?).

Many thanks for any suggestions,
Grant

ver 2.0.15

br360

That's actually a lot to try to be uploading via an attachment. Anything you upload (even small kb pics) takes up space on your server; and instead of trying to increase attachment limits, I would highly recommend using a video embed mod so you can embed a video in the actual post itself and not as an attachment.


GigaWatt

That's probably a server setting (won't accept files larger than 10MB). And I don't think you can actually set it through cPanel.

And as br360 already pointed out, it's probably wise to share video content through video sharing sites and embed the video in the post or share the video via a files sharing service (there are so many to choose from these days, many of them keep the content for an unlimited period, as long as you keep your account active).

Another problem would be, what if you decide to change host's one day. You'd have to be looking for a host that actually accepts large files. And there is also the webspace problem br360 pointed out. If you do decide to upload large files, you could hit the 10GB mark within a few months, which would make backing up and restoring backups complicated :S.
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

Arantor

And even if you get the file on there, getting it back off to play it will likely end badly too.

Grant

Thanks folks (bloody head cold so just now catching up with things). Yes, It's probably a time-out issue with my host. The forum is a closed forum for my son's rugby team, so every year there's just me putting up the pictures and videos for others to view. Otherwise, I would definitely be going the way you suggest. It would be nice if there was a way I could use ftp to put the files in a folder and then link them to posts.

Hmmmm. Hang on. maybe I could drop them in my own folder on the same server and embed them somehow in the posts. I'll look for that video embed mod you mention and see if that works. It's strange that my host will allow ftp of large files but not whatever smf uses to attach files. I'll give it a go anyway.

Many thanks,
Grant

Arantor

FTP is designed for sending files, it has completely different timeouts as compared to PHP, mostly because If you let PHP have no restrictions on timeouts, you can take down an entire server with it (which you can't really do with FTP nearly so easily)

Another alternative is the LevertineGallery mod which I'd have to dig up the link for, it can handle larger uploads without any settings changes but you still have issues getting videos back down again because you have to deal with PHP timeouts which means the entire file would have to be sent to the browser inside 30 seconds.

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

For larger video files, I'd actually suggest Youtube.
It's free, you can limit access, it works on virtually any platform, and it's easy to embed right on SMF :)
Slava
Ukraini!


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GigaWatt

@Grant: As I said previously, file sharing sites and (as suggested by other users) media sharing sites would be the way to go in this case. I usually use box.com (which has a 10GB per month bandwidth limit and kind of sucks because of this :S) or asuswebstorage.com (which only has a 1GB per day download limit, which is OK I guess ;)). The first one, box.com has a max file size of 250MB (also, kind of sucks :S), but asuswebstorage.com has a 500MB per file limit (nice :)). Also box.com has a 10GB storage space limit for a free account, asuswebstorage.com has a 5GB storage space limit (you could get a larger storage space if you linked it with an Asus account in case you've ever bought any Asus products, but even though I have, I've never linked my account, so I wouldn't know how much storage you would gain).

Having said that, I just remembered that Google Drive also supports unlimited file sizes, downloads and a 15GB storage space ::). Mediafire also supports all of this, but it's limited to a 10GB storage space for free (less than Google Drive). The plus would be that you can open up multiple accounts because it requires only a working email address for the registration process ;).

You could also recompress the images (cut on size) using simple software like FastStone Image Viewer or IrfanView. Both of them are free and support bulk recompresson (not sure about IrfanView, I've never used it extensively, but I can vouch for FastStone Image Viewer since I use it almost every day for simple image manipulation tasks ;)). Trust me, most people wouldn't recognize the difference between a 60% JPEG compression ratio and a 95% compression ratio ;), but the difference in file size is huge (cuts down from 1/4 to 1/3 of the original files size, if the compression ratio is really high, as said, 95% or higher). As an example, I cut down on size of my wedding pictures from 9GB to a mere 3GB, and even I can't distinguish between the original ones and the recompressed images :D.

Recompressing videos is a bit... well, tricky... if you're planning on doing it the right way. Most cameras just push the sample rate as high as they can and leave you with 60 second clip with a file size of 1GB ::)... which IMO is unacceptable. If you're interested, I made some tutorials a while back about recompresing videos with some free tools, I could try and dig them up :). The file size ratio would also be a 1/4 to about 1/3 of the original file size without any visual difference to the common user ;).
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

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