Transcoding videos

not sure why, so I created a link to this thread in the last post and the first as well.
Thanks for your continued contribution to the community!

Dave

_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

I think it's worth having a backpointer to the old thread as well so people coming from the codex page can find it easily: http://gallery.menalto.com/node/98144

So I've been banging my head against this, but not being much of a php hacker, I'm not making much progress. Trying to save the Transcoding Settings page all I can get is:

There was a problem with the submitted form. Please check your values and try again.

With no indication that anything is going wrong (nothing in the gallery logs, nor the apache error logs, aparts from ffmpeg output). All I can tell from inserting debugging statements into the php is that the $form->validate() call in admin_transcode.php:index() is failing. It's not obvious to me what validate() is causing to get called. The javascript in admin_transcode.html.php? Any hints on how to debug this?

Great, thanks! I had to make one fix since it doesn't seem like I am getting the ffmpeg_flags set:

module::set_var("transcode", "ffmpeg_flags",       (isset($_POST['ffmpeg_flags']) ? $_POST['ffmpeg_flags'] : false)); 

I've had some issues I think due to the installation of php I've got perhaps being stricter than normal...when trying to save it was complaining about $ffmpeg_flags being undefined. Similarly, in transcode_event() I had to initialize $i up at the top or I would get an error and since it seemed sensible I incremented it in the loop below:

diff -ur t/transcode/helpers/transcode_event.php transcode/helpers/transcode_event.php
--- t/transcode/helpers/transcode_event.php     2012-09-15 11:58:52.000000000 -0400
+++ transcode/helpers/transcode_event.php       2012-09-18 20:22:38.483986662 -0400
@@ -74,6 +74,8 @@
     }
 
     static function item_created($item) {
+        $i = 0;
+
         if ($item->is_movie()) {
             transcode::log("Item created - is a movie. Let's create a transcode task or 2..");
             $ffmpegPath = transcode::getFfmpegPath();
@@ -223,6 +225,8 @@
                         ->name("Video Transcode task (" . ($i + 1) . ") to " . $destWidth . "x" . $destHeight)
                         ->severity(log::SUCCESS);
 
+                $i++;
+
                 $task = task::create(
                             $task_def,
                             array(

I also had to fix the ffmpeg_flags which my previous contortions had caused to be set to '0' rather than false, leading to a bad ffmpeg command line. Finally, for additonal hilarity, I somehow had a root-owned var/modules/transcode directory from a previous installation 5 months ago hanging around, preventing the log file from being written.

However, while this gets me to the point that the upload works, I can see the ffmpeg task run in transcode.log, and I can see the transcoded video in var/modules/transcode/flv/<id #>/XRESxYRES.flv, trying to play the video the flash player shows an error:
200, Stream not found, Netstream.Play.StreamNotFound, clip: '[Clip] 'http://www.server.name/gallery3/var/albums/Chris/MVI_1533.avi?m=1348186898''
Any ideas?

I think the problem is that while the flv transcodes are being created, the flash player is still being directed to the file I uploaded which is a random AVI file that's not supported by flash (in retrospect this is kind of obvious but installing the g3jwplayer module gave me a somewhat more readable error message). Perhaps it's related to the fact that the “Alternative Resolutions” box says “No alternative resolutions available.”? If I look in the page's source code I do see this snippet:

            var fpItmId = "g-item-id-48328";
            var fpBaseUrl = "http://server.name/gallery3/var/modules/transcode/flv/48328/";
            $f(fpItmId).onLoad(function() {
                                    changeVideo("640x480");
                            });

Could it be related to the fact that I'm using the Grey Dragon theme?

What theme are you using? It's tested and works perfectly on the default theme. Perhaps a custom/other theme has changed that HTML element's ID? In which case I'd expected this to break. If I can find out what themes change it (and what they change the ID's to) I can perhaps accommodate this in the code somewhere.

The 2038 error I've seen come up a few times, but is generally harmless, as you observed, the transcode task is still going on in the background. I think it's down to perhaps a php max_execution_time setting, or (more likely) a connection timeout between your browser and the server - the connection's no longer there, but the process is still ongoing on the server. When the transcode task is going on, there's no data transfer between the server and your browser, so if it's a lengthy task, chances are something's disconnecting, or closing the connection prematurely, causing this error. I know of no way of stopping this, other than perhaps connecting it into a scheduler/cron module I've updated for another module I've written, so that maybe the task completes immediately, and the video is either served up as-is to begin with, or put into a "pending" state until all the transcode tasks have started to complete (much like youtube makes available the resolutions as and when it's encoded them).

Dan
-----
danneh.org :: Gallery3

A new ffmpeg that just showed up in Debian changed the output of 'ffmpeg -codecs' slightly, using 7 dashes rather than 6. This naive patch to transcode.php helps me:

-            if ($line == " ------") {
+            if (($line == " ------") || ($line == " -------")) {

Nonek - I think the easiest thing is just to go directly into Admin -> Settings -> Advanced and delete the value for transcode / ffmpeg_flags. You might need to do this every time you change something in the settings page, it seems to creep back in sometimes. Directly fiddling the settings can be useful for other reasons as well - the settings page only lets me choose the “aac” codec, but the default one that ffmpeg chooses has problems with some audio streams I want to hand it. by editing transcode / audio_codec to “libvo_aacenc” instead, I can select an alternate encoder I wouldn't normally be able to.

Flash can only play mp4 that uses .h264 video codec and either AAC or MP3 audio

-s
________________________________
All New jQuery Minislideshow for G2/G3

Does anyone else has a problem with the validation function. This is what I get when I try to upload avi and mp4. I'm with Galery 3.0.4 and transcode 13:

I've seen in another topic (http://gallery.menalto.com/node/107283) that previously file extensions were fixed with adding an event.

Additionally I tried to add another event to cover the mime types but the result was the same error:
./modules/transcode/helpers/transcode_event.php

Any suggestions

I ran into bunch of other problems.
I made a few modifications, just want to bring them to the attention of the module devs, maybe worth it to add them to the new version.

PROBLEM: where Task name is build out of unknown variable $i
ERROR: Undefined variable: i (in gallery log)
SOLUTION:
static function item_created($item)
add $i=0 outside
and $i++ inside the foearch task loop

PROBLEM: ffprobe doesn't return a result
ERROR: Trying to get property of non-object (in gallery log)
SOLUTION: My version of ffprobe didn't accept the -i argument. When ran manually with the same options as from the script it gave an error.
I removed the "-i" argument

PROBLEM: Occationally ffmpeg will stuck forever on an avi video (I'm with version 0.10 now)
SOLUTION: Add "-timelimit 120"
to ffmpeg arguments helps to me.

PROBLEM: The above will terminate the ffmpeg but unfortunately the task of transcode will continue to run.
ERROR: Infinite printing of "encoded time: 00:00:02.32" in transcode.log
SOLUTION: Additionally set a limit for the transcode task in class transcode_task_Core::transcode :

PROBLEM: And although clips are uploaded and play well, the uploader still gets an error message.

Found and solved it - I found the actual FFMPEG command string in the transcode log and saw that the flag -acodec was not filled (only followed by a space).
I also was not able to have a choice in the admin page on the audio codec (select box was not filled).

I solved this by going to the advanced settings and set the audiocode manually to "aac".

Now works fine - only have one remaining issue:

The thumbnail of the transcoded videos is not shown (always shows pic is broken). All thumbnails of other mp4 native formats I upload that do not use transcode work fine.
Checked whether there is a pic existing in the directory - there is. Downloaded it - seems good. Trying to open it in the browser gives me a Kohana 404 exception, although the file exists (see below). Checked permissions and changed owner - no change, still the same error.

Log File does not help me:

Did anybody else have this issue? Any idea how to fix it / nail down the error?

Kohana Exception thrown:

Good point - I had the same idea and did try it. Did not change the issue, issue still pertains.

Seems the proxy script does not find the thumbnails - weird behavior. Any other ideas / suggestions what I could try?
Who has a good knowledge on the proxy module / script within Gallery3?

Again - thumbnails do exist on the server, just can't seem to access them. Tried all file system permission ideas I had - chmod 777, change owners to webserver or webroot, etc. - no change.

Thanks for your support!

Now use version 10 and this seems kind of working for me.

Only remaining issue I have is that some Thumbnails of certain movie types are not found by the Kohana proxy although they are created with same permissions as other thumbs - will open a separate thread under Troubleshoot for that since it looks to me more an issue to Kohana than to this module.

Well - did this help to get the full module functionality?

I used version 10 and compiled a new ffmpeg which seems to now work for me.

The experimental version of G3 has a setting/checkbox on the movies/ffmpeg config page to help with rebuilding the thumbs. Movies don't have resizes.

Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

I was just pointing out that the experimental version has an option to rebuild the movies, perhaps this module listens to that flag and rebuilds all the versions as well. I have never used the module and just wanted to point out a new feature that perhaps this module will use or perhaps be extended to use.

Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team