Topic awaiting preservation: Suggestions for video upload (Page 1 of 1)

Let's see if I can explain what I want to do.

We have a sever on one domain (say http://videos.domain.com) that is going to process videos that are uploaded by users and convert them to a flash format. The server can only process one video at a time so they will need to be put in a queue.

Now, the upload form will be on a different server (http://main.domain.com) and we want to be able to upload the video to the remote server and then get an answer back from that server after it's done it's thing so we can give the user a proper error or success message. My original thought for doing this was to make the form action action="http://videos.domain.com/video.php" and then just use a header("Location: http://main.domain.com/uploadForm.php?result=true") or whatever result we want to send back may be.

Never having done a lot with files as large as video files will probably be, I started to wonder if this was the best way at all. I'm assuming the odds of the upload going slower or screwing up completely is much greater if I'm doing it to a remote server instead of keeping it on the local server. Then I was thinking I could put them local to begin with so the user didn't have to put up with it going over a remote connection. The problem then becomes the fact that I'm not sure how I would go about getting them from the local machine to the remote machine and queued up to be processed in an automatted way.

Any suggestions for the best way to go about this or should I just do it the way I've already put forth? Or maybe open a socket and do a 2 way with that?

Thanks for any help or guidance you may have to offer.

- Butcher -

Having a sever dedicated to hosting the video sounds good. The user will have to upload the video, be it on the portal or the videos server is not important. It will be as long ... unless the video server is crawling under zillion of requests. In this case, an option could be to process the video upload on the portal, and when it's done, copy it to the videos server via the LAN of your host / server farm. You'll have to see with host to get the IP and path of the videos server. Another option could be to have a CRON job on the portal server check every minute if there is any video ready and waiting to be uploaded on the videos server.


I'm not really into video, so could you explain what you mean by Flash format. Has Ado-media created their own codec ?

Honestly... I wouldn't use browser upload for this.
I have seen some nice java applets that can resume, show sensible progress bars and the like,
that would be a million times more userfriendly ( oh, and yeah, have a browser upload fallback for those guys without java, they're used to the pain )

so long,

->Tyberius Prime

I think the flash format reffers to the way youtube and google video host their videos.

I saw this:
http://www.raditha.com/php/ftp/
it seems php has a way of dealing with ftp, but its probably just a good interface for browser upload, I didnt really look into it.

Yea, Hugh has it right.

Sorry for the late reply, I've been waiting to hear from the guy that's handling that part of it so I could give you proper info on the server that does the conversion but like I said Hugh's got it in a nutshell.

Thanks for the replies and suggestions.

- Butcher -