Just a note while I’m working on uploads: I was running into that media uploader problem we’d discussed around a couple of weeks ago. I decided to broaden my playing with it.
- On Firefox 3.5, when starting the upload, it beachballs and then crashes and brings up the Crash Reporter.
- On Safari 4, it beachballs and then never comes back from Never Never Land. Has to be force quit.
- On Opera 9 (!) the upload doesn’t even pause. As soon as the file is selected, the progress bar begins, and it’s now at 32% and rocking.
I’m curious as to why a Flash component is seeing such different results based on browser, but there it is.
Michael Pick are discussing. 
Michael Pick 12:07 am on August 1, 2009 Permalink |
Interesting. The widget uploads were seamless yesterday – I’m guessing their brevity (and therefore small sizes) played a role, but they allowed me to upload multiple files in one go. Seems to give some credence to your thoughts on something loading initially into system memory, as the same thing uploaded pre-transcode (i.e. at a larger file size) caused a 0% hang after a lengthy beachball pause. If that’s a flash issue, maybe the browser uploader is better for now?
As for browsers different handling of flash – I’ve had problems playing Flash and Quicktime for a long time in Firefox, with bizarre glitches, buffer/download fails and more. The same appear fine in Safari, but that has different issues of it’s own.
Ryan Markel 1:22 am on August 1, 2009 Permalink |
The file in question was 215 MB.
The problem with the browser uploader is that there’s no way of knowing if it’s succeeding, and IIRC I’ve had a browser upload of 500 MB+ size fail before as well.
Ryan Markel 1:22 am on August 1, 2009 Permalink |
And because we’re using Flash, I wonder if Windows users would be running into the same issues. My guess is that they are not.
Michael Pick 6:00 am on August 1, 2009 Permalink |
Windows plays nicer with Flash?
Ryan Markel 12:54 am on August 2, 2009 Permalink |
Yes. Flash is horribly optimized (or not optimized) for Mac OS.
In fact, I just queued up three downloads that are over 400 MB each in Firefox 3.5 for Windows. The first upload started immediately with no problems. I guess I have a reason to keep a VM around after all.
I’ll be interested to see how the uploads complete here.