Video Processing

Having a Video Processing Issue.. I've had two different people look into this. Videos seem to upload fine.. however it just continues to say "Video Processing" Won't play or finish processing.

Anyone out there interested in working on this. Compensation would be fine...

thanks.

First thing to check is the cron job.

Second thing would be that ffmpeg is working.

The Cron's seem to be set up correctly. HOw would I make sur ethe ffmpeg is working?

any chance I can get you to help me out with t his?

Are you getting any emails from the cron daemon?

I am not.. I have a feeling its the crons..

I have crons set as followed:

/usr/local/bin/php -q m:/home/jamesd/www/d70/periodic/cron.php

With : * * * * for week time etc..

then next line  :

/jamesd/local/bin/php -q /home/jamesd/public_html/vz_autoposting7.php

With ** * * * for week time etc..

actually changed first line to :

/usr/local/bin/php -q m:/home/jamesd/public_html/periodic/cron.php

still not receiving any cron emails though.

Try this for your cron jobs:

cd /path/to/dolphin/periodic; /path/to/php/ -q cron.php

I also recommend reading: http://www.boonex.com/unity/forums/topic/Troubleshooting-Crons-Videos-Migrations-RMS.htm.

Ok i'll give this a shot to see if it works.

Hmm tried that with no luck. I am getting Cron emails.. :( ARGHHH!

What are the contents of those emails?

I keep getting..

Unlicensed Template - Please contact with developer.

seems to be sending out these emails every minute :(

I couldn't use what the script told me to use. So this is how I had to do mine.

/usr/bin/php -c /home/xxxxx/public_html/php.ini -q /home/xxxxx/public_html/periodic/cron.php

You could maybe give this a try and see if it works for you.

/usr/bin/php -c /home/jamesd/www/php.ini -q /home/jamesd/www/d70/periodic/cron.php

Otherwise ask your host what you should be using

Hmm let me try this :)

should cd /usr/bin/php -c /home/jamesd/www/php.ini -q /home/jamesd/www/d70/periodic/cron.php

as in the cd be in front of it?

I don't have

d70/periodic/cron.php in my WWW file directory nor the php.ini file under

www/php.ini

cd /home/jamesd/public_html/periodic; /usr/local/bin/php -q cron.php

set as such.. I keep getting emails that say:

Are you using a custom template? cuz that message has nothing to do with a cron job. With a cron problem you would get an email like Magussoft mentioned.

Actually.. listen to this.. weird enough..

Videos would never process. I am using custom "Black template"

I changed template back to default.. and videos processed!!

It was cron emails:

Cron <jamesd@server1> cd /home/jamesd/public_html/periodic; /usr/local/bin/php -q cron.php

then it said template wasn't registered or something.

I ordered custom template with custom black skin players.. Videos will PROCESS now.. not showing though.. I think because of  custom black skin around player...

Very odd..

I changed back to custom template.. and get the same  cron email every minute saying template isn't registered. How weird is th at?

Sounds like the template included some tricks to thwart unauthorized copies.  The cron job was probably emailing the author as well.

Yea I guess so.   Well I emailed the template author. I'm not very happy as its wasted alot of my time checking and rechecking. Been working on this issue for 2 weeks or more only to find out its the template.. PISSED.

Welcome the the club!

*laugh* Been in the club awhile.. the oddest things happen :)

Been in the SAME club 4 nearly a year.  SMH  I can't believe a template would keep videos from processing, yet this could be my problem as well.  @ gatek33per, my template is the same as yours and I love it.  Love the look of it and don't want to revert back to Dolphins ugly core template just get y videos to work.  You know first hand how long I have been having issues with videos, even testing them on your site.  I haven't had success with my videos since day one and now I have been dealing with video issue of nearly a year.  ARGGGH!  Ridiculous that a template could actually keep videos from processing, make absolutely no sense at all.  I'm not about to throw away my template just to get videos to work as I paid good money for the template. Certainly there should be some explanation for the processing issue.  When I embed my videos on other sites the videos NEVER progress to a state where they can be played, instead it just hangs in the "processing" status, even let one video run 2 days and it never advanced from processing to playable.  I graduated from not being able to upload videos at all to videos that don't embed ANYWHERE even on Dolphin powered  sites.  If someone with expertise with videos that actually reads these forums please, please respond to this thread.

I got this working on a linux box by deleting ffmpeg.exe from flash/modules/global/app and creating a symbolic link to the linux executable version, if you don't know how to do this just run the following command from within your flash/modules/global/app dir:

ln -s `which ffmpeg` ffmpeg.exe

you have to have deleted/renamed the original ffmpeg.exe before doing this obviously.

As far as cron goes you should not be using -q, not sure why everyone is suggesting that.  My cron runs the following command:

/usr/bin/php -c /etc/php.ini -f /var/www/vhosts/bmc/html/periodic/cron.php

works every time.

That path isn't going to work on Arvixe (or most other hosts).. and everyone is using -q because it's correct.

 Why does it seem like every topic I look through in the Boonex forums is infested with snide comments from self absorbed jerks who don't have a clue what they are talking about?

First of all smart guy, the server I referenced is hosted by Rackspace and is running PHP 5.2, Apache 2.2 and Mysql Server 5, which is pretty much the most common lamp configuration (give or take a minor version or two) out there.  So to say that "that path" isn't going to work on some rinky dink, fly by night web hosting outfit that no one has ever heard of just makes you sound stupid, especially when you matter of factly throw in "or most other hosts" as if that becomes true simply because you typed it.

Just to clear up any confusion, the following statements are absolutely and unequivocally true and verifiable facts:

1.) The DEFAULT installation path for the php executable binary when installing PHP via APT/YUM/DPKG is /usr/bin/php. This is something anyone who has ever setup a server can tell you.

2.) The DEFAULT location for Apache web root directories is /var/www, again this is common knowledge for any competent server admin.

3.) The -q option DOESN'T DO ANYTHING unless you're using php-cgi to parse CGI scripts with mod_actions, there is absolutely NO REASON TO USE IT WITH DOLPHIN.

The bottom line however, is that my posting wasn't intended to be a set of installation instructions. My hope was that anyone with basic Linux skills would be able to adapt the process I outlined to suit their particular needs.  So unless you have something useful to add, or at the very least something that's not just a made up load of crap, then you should probably just keep it to yourself.

I think all you need to do is get a fresh version of ffmpeg from the ffmpeg site and overwrite the stale version Dolphin is using.

That may actually cause more problems than it solves unless you're well versed in ffmpeg command line switches and edit your flash/modules/video/inc/header.inc.php file to account for the changes in the available options (ffmpeg --help).  For instance the -b #bitrate#kb switch is ambiguous in the newest version of ffmpeg and you have to change it to -b:v #bitrate#k .

The main point of my post however was how to modify the default Dolphin installation to work with ffmpeg for Linux as the ffmpeg.exe binary that's included is for windows only.

This is another  tidbit that Linux users can use at their own risk. I wanted ffmpeg to run as soon as possible after a video was uploaded, but simply increasing the frequency of the cron job slowed my system to a crawl if multiple videos were waiting to be encoded. This is a simple shell script I created in the crontab users home directory called ffmpeg-cron (make sure you do: chmod +x ffmpeg-cron). 

#!/bin/bash

 PSRETVAL=0

FFRETVAL=0

echo -n "Running transcoding cron job: "

ps r --no-heading -C ffmpeg.exe >&/dev/null

PSRETVAL=$?

if [ $PSRETVAL == 0 ]; then

        echo "ffmpeg already running"

else

        echo "starting transcoder"

        /usr/bin/php -c /var/www/vhosts/bmc/periodic_php.ini -f /var/www/vhosts/bmc/html/periodic/cron.php 

        FFRETVAL=$?

fi

if [ $FFRETVAL == 0 ]; then

        echo "Transcoding run completed successfully"

else

        echo "Transcoding run failed:"$FFRETVAL

fi

exit $FFRETVAL

It should be noted as well that this uses a custom php.ini with a much higher memory_limit setting (among other things). This is run every 5 minutes by adding the following line to the cron users crontab (crontab -e):

*/5 * * * * ~/ffmpeg-cron

If you are on a machine running some flavor of Unix/Linux and can't get the video module to work , try replacing the installation binary (ffmpeg.exe) with one of your own or download a fresh one from the ffmpeg web site.

We did and now the video uploading and processing works but you still must refresh your browser after a few minutes of processing to get to the point where you can play your video. It really is a rather slow and cumbersome way to get things done but maybe in the future the developers will be kind enough to do something about it.

By the way, it's ok to use the .exe extension for Unix/Linux (not sure why it's named as if it were a Windows executable), just upload your fresh version as ffmpeg.exe to the /flash/modules/global/app/ directory or folder and replace or overwrite the ffmpeg.exe file that is there.

Maybe the developers or whoever is responsible for these sort of things will be generous enough to take a little time to make sure they use a fresh binary in the installation package. How about it guys? What do you say? It sure would save a lot of grief as attested to in this forum.

 Hi.  Could you give me the link to ffmpeg.exe download?  I went to official website but it I got lost there. lol
Also, does it need to be edited or can I just replace the old one?

Thank you for sharing this.  I guess now a lot of users are getting into this issue. 

http://ffmpeg.org/download.html

Just replace the old with the new. I'm not sure you actually need to rename to ffmpeg.exe but we did just in case and it works fine.

Another solution would be to ask your web host provider to copy it from wherever it is located on the server to your  /flash/modules/global/app/   directory.  The copy on the web server is probably more current than the one in the Dolphin installation.

I as well am still having issues with larger videos processing. I can upload smaller clips like 5 megs or so, upload them with the flash or reg fine and those process although it may take a 5 meg clips 30 minutes or so to process. I tried to upload a 14.9 meg clip the other day. Uploaded fine but just kept saying VIDEO PROCESSING then eventually failed. My hosting says its the script. Been having this issue for months and we cannot figure out the problem.

I promise it isn't the script, I've got 70mb movies on one of my site. When you look at phpinfo what is the number for "max_execution_time" and "max_input_time"?

yes it's not the software, I have 700MB movies on my demo server http://www.duvallocals.info/m/videos/view/The-Thing

The trick is, disable H264 under Admin>Modules>Flash Apps>Video Player>Setting Icon> 

un tick "Use H264 codec (?)"  and save. This will reduce the processing time for larger files,

and you should make sure like mscott states.

Make sure your "max_execution_time" is set high enough to allow processing of longer videos.

[PHP]
 
 
 
upload_max_filesize=128M
 
post_max_size=128M

memory_limit=512M

max_execution_time=1200

max_input_time = 1200

i also unticked that setting so (crossing my fingers)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You're php settings look fine. Let us know if Newton's suggestion works.

was able to process the 14.9 video and didnt take long at all to process. Trying a 60meg now. Let ya know tomarrow morn...

Thanks for the advice NEWTON :)

YES it WORKS!!! THANK YOU

NEWTON, your a GOD!

:)

 lol! your welcome

Just long time fighting with video processing when I started.

I didn't figure this out own my own, there are topics here from awhile back that helped.

http://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/Video-processing-issues.htm

Im having the same problem, I checked everything to the best of my knowledge if someone could help me with this I would be very greatful. I talked to my webhost and they said it was a boonex problem not a server problem so they cant help.

 If you keep posting new topics and don't answer the quesions we ask on the original topics it makes it very difficult to help you. Why did you bump a 2 year old thread instead of answering the questions we asked on your own thread?

http://www.boonex.com/forums/#topic/Video-Processing-2013-08-12.htm