Unable to update some Discussions

I'm getting this error [-see image] when trying to update some discussions.
It appears that all discussions have now been associated with Groups. However, not all older Discussions were linked with a group.

Thank you.
updated by @isleander: 07/09/16 09:21:02AM

Try the latest module updates and let me know if you still see an issue and I can check it out.

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Thanks Brian... Yes works now!

However, my groups (Admin) are not showing up now in the front page box "Top Groups", although other user's groups are showing.

Still having problems with video files not loading to the JR Video Player. Will only load in Firefox.

Thanks again.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Glad to hear that.


I think someone else reported this as well - I will check it out.


I'm not aware of any issues with Video - do you have a link to a video that is not playing in browsers besides Firefox?

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Yes, sure:
http://regal-network.com/ncnorg/admin/video/8/mp4-test-video-les-garrett-pt1
This is a 10 minute video, but even in Firefox only plays for 1 minute.

http://regal-network.com/ncnorg/admin/video/9/old-fashioned-meeting
This is a 3.34 minute video, but even in Firefox only plays for 1.10 minutes.

I uploaded these to test the player.

Thank you,
Alex
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I don't see any issues in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It's not working in Safari, which is weird - I'm suspecting Safari does not like something about the video. You can see Safari works fine here:

http://regal-network.com/ncnorg/admin/video/7/a-message-from-jd-drysdale

So it's something specific to those videos.


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Yes the Drysdale one works fine... except it doesn't play all of the video - only just over a minute of it.

Could it be due to the "size" of the file?
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I don't think so - unless your server is really slow and cannot send all the video data fast enough.

One thing to check - go into your ACP -> Server Check and click on the small "phpinfo" link in the PHP section - scroll through that and make sure "output buffering" has not been enabled on your server.

Hope this helps!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Do you mean System Check?
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Yes...


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I'm trawling through it all. Do you know exactly which section it is under?

I'm not able to detect it, I'm sorry. Been up and down it, but cannot see it.

It's PHP Version 5.3.28, running on Linux. but cannot see anything about buffering on the list.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Got it ... it has : output_buffering 4096 4096
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I think that's OK - that's the default. I'm not sure why it won't play on Safari, but I will see if I can figure it out when I get a chance here. Most likely the "header" frames that tell the browser meta data about the file could be corrupted, but that's just a guess.

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Actually based on your edits of your posts above, I would suspect that the server is killing the process that is sending the data before it is finished (which is why you are seeing it stop).

Do you host your own server or are you on someone else's hosting?

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Thanks Brian.

When you say header file... do you mean on the videos? If so, I have had no problem playing them from a HTML file (Dreamweaver) in Safari, or when uploading them to YouTube or Vimeo.

It all way too complicated for me... sorry!
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I use a hosting company. Heart Internet in the UK, and have unlimited data storage.
http://heartinternet.co.uk

Should I contact them about this problem?

What is the recommended PHP.ini settings?
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I understand it can be confusing

So all videos have specific bits of information stored in them that are basically "meta data" - i.e. info that tells filesystems and players specific things about the video - name of video, copyright, whatever. MOST of the time these "header frames" are found at the beginning of a file (say first few thousand bytes) and so what a browser does is it does a "scan" request, where it tries to grab the first 100k or so of a file to find these header frames. If it does NOT find them, then sometimes it will try to download the file since the frames can be stuck on the END of the file, and it will look for them there.

The problem here is that the file download is getting cut off before the entire file can download, and so nothing works. They of course play locally since you can "load" the entire file in about 2 seconds.

They will work on YouTube since YouTube converts all uploaded videos (including FLV) to MP4 and WEBM, so it can "fix" the bad headers. In Jamroom, we actually skip re-encoding FLV files since we've found that that often deteriorates the quality of the video. However that also means if the file is bad, it's going to stay bad. In my experience this is actually really rare - I can think of only a handful of times I've seen (if it is what I think it is here). You can test for sure by re-converting the video on your PC (or mac) and re-uploading the new one - if it works, then it was a bad file.

Hope this helps!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I use iMovie and ScreenFlow to make recordings, but have used Quicktime and Voila "capture" to record some footage from the Internet - so could be a problem there with meta data.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I've deleted the PHP.ini file I created to see if that will make any difference.

I had previously upped the memory, load and time values to enable larger files - to see if that would help; but it made no difference to the problem of not playing the videos.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

The other thing it could be is that your hosting provider is locking the max run time to 30 seconds (or 60 seconds or whatever). It's not something you can tell by looking at the config, as the default is 30 seconds. Jamroom will override that (if it can), but I've seen some hosting providers lock down the use of set_time_limit() - i.e. regardless of what Jamroom tries to set it to, it's going to go 30 seconds (which can cause the process to be killed while it is still working).

Your hosting provider is the only one that can tell you that though.

Hope this helps!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

OK. I will contact them, and go from there with this.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

This is info i received from my Host Support team.
--------
Looking at the video player I can see the flash player is streaming the video am I correct in saying that the video format is .flv and .m4v ? If this is the case I would recommend uploading your videos in .mp4 format because I have found that this format has better support across the browsers.

Would it be possible to attempt streaming a video using HTML5? I am not sure how attached you are to the flash player but you may find this easier to work with.

Here is an example of how you can use this. See image.

Basically what you can do here is list as many source types as you like and the one that is supported by X browser will be used for example the webm one above works in FireFox while mp4 works in IE, Chrome and Safari.

--------
=edited=
It would appear that the max memory permitted is 128M. Which gives me only 32MB Maximum. So will be unable to upload larger video files. Effectively, for me, this makes the JR video player redundant.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

.m4v IS an MP4, and has wide support on mobile devices.


Jamroom's player is an HTML 5 player - it falls back to flash if the browser does not support HTML 5.


I'm not following here - how does the max allowed upload size make the player redundant?

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Brian,

If the PHP Memory Limit = 128M, the max quota will be 32MB. Very few quailty video files would be smaller than 32MB. I don't think I have any that size. I suppose I could lower the quality of the files when recording/saving them to make them smaller, but that would't be a preference.

Does that make sense?

=Edit=

e.g. A small basic 10 minute file recorded with ScreenFlow is above 340 MB in size (the default format is mp4). For default export settings, please see image. The same low quality file is nearly 43 MB.

updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Sure - if you want to accept larger videos than 32mb, you'll need to set your php.ini settings to something much larger than 128M - say 1024M, which will get you a 256M upload limit.

https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/documentation/problems/748/how-do-i-increase-phps-upload-limit

Let me know if that helps.

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Yes I did that... but still having problems playing videos.
I created a new video and saved it at low rate, but it only played 1.10 minutes of 10 minutes ???

Large file never upload successfully, but always fail. Please see image.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

You have a problem with your server - it's very hard from here to tell you what it is, but you've got something that is restricting the time a script can run, the amount of data it can read, the amount of memory it can use, etc. Your hosting provider would have to check out your PHP install and figure out what it is, although my 11+ years experience doing this I'm fairly certain your hosting provider will say it is a script issue - they always do.


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Brian,

My host specified that 128m is the max allowed for memory. Which only gives me a 32MB file size. Apparently increasing the memory max to above 128m will cause the server to drop back to the 24MB default,

They've run a check on the server, and said there were errors. They suggest looking at the .htaccess file.

They did copy this error.
regal-network.com [Fri Nov 21 15:37:30 2014] [error] [client 81.129.244.254:56370] AH01215: sh: line 1: 22069 CPU time limit exceeded nice -n 12 /home/sites/regal-network.com/public_html/ncnorg/modules/jrCore/tools/ffmpeg -y -i "/home/sites/regal-network.com/public_html/ncnorg/data/media/1/1/jrVideo_10_video_file.avi.original.avi" -threads 1 -s 320x240 -b 200k -bt 240k -vcodec libx264 -acodec libfaac -ac 2 -ar 48000 -ab 128k "/home/sites/regal-network.com/public_html/ncnorg/data/media/1/1/jrVideo_10_video_file.avi.original.avi.m4v" > /dev/null 2> /home/sites/regal-network.com/public_html/ncnorg/data/cache/jrVideo/conversionfO21gx

Whilst I can understand some of this, it's above my station in life at present.

They also mentioned having too many internal redirects on the server, which could cause a problem. Apparently I am only permitted to have ten.

Anyway, That's about all I know at present.

I do appreciate all the help and advice you fellas have been giving, and all the time you spend trying to sort out amateurs like me (they say a little knowledge is dangerous!)


Thanks again,
Alex

=edited=

The .htaccess file looks fine to me (image attached)
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

That looks like the culprit to me.

It looks like the catch to "unlimited data storage". I read it as the server telling you: "I tried to convert your big video, but it took too long, so I stopped."

Seams like the server package you have is restricting how long you can use the processor.
updated by @michael: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Thanks Michael.

Host support suggest increasing max execution time, which I have now done.

Quote:
"...if you are uploading via a PHP form, then you will need to increase the max execution time to a larger number, as the script uploading the file will crash partway through due to it exceeding the max_execution_time figure."

However, 128M is their max memory allowance (allowing a 32MB file). If I increase the max memory to more than 128M, it reverts to the default allocated allowance of 24MB.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Jamroom already tries to increase max allowed upload time (I will double check but I believe it is already done).

Unfortunately with the limits in place on your server you're not going to be able to host media of anything but very small size - JR will not be able to run FFMpeg to convert the media, and you won't be able to upload anything very large.


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

I have just opened an account with Arvixe (just to try it out). It has the option of automatically setting up scripts when you first sign up for an account, one such being Jamroom (as I am sure you know). I noticed straight away that the limit on the Arvixe server is 128MB. Three times as much as my other host.

I asked my current host 'why the discrepancy?'. They say I can increase the max memory if I need to. But this conflicts with their previous statement. So really I'm no clearer!

I'm currently awaiting clarification from them.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

"our apples are 3 for $1"
"the guy down the road is selling 4 for $1"
"We can do 4 for $1"

Choosing a host can be difficult. Especially because they don't all put out all the info to make it easy to compare.

Hopefully your current host sorts out your server so it works as well as it needs to. Let us know what they say.
updated by @michael: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Well, I have had no problems uploading and playing video files with Arvixe server. Probably because their standard file upload size is 128MB.

Still on going problems with other host. They have been giving me contradictory info. Even though they now say the upload limit is 512MB, they have not explained to me how to configure PHP.ini to accomplish this. I've tried different setting, but large files always fail, and the ones I do manage to upload do not play properly or they just do not play.
For that reason I've momentarily disabled the use of the Video Player on the standard user quota.

If I could migrate my members to the other Jamroom site (with Avrixe) I would.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

If you want to change to Arvixe hosting, they can transfer your site for you, I just had them do this for another site I've been working on.


--

Douglas Hackney
Jamroom Team - Designer/Developer/Support
FAQ-Docs-Help Videos
updated by @douglas: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

Douglas,

Yes that would be great.

I have the original Jamroom site at http://regal-network.com/ncnorg

My Arvixe URL which has Jamroom is http://new-testament.info

Please let me know what is needed to do this.

Thank you,
Alex
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

You'll want to contact Arvixe, they are the only ones that can do it for you, we don't have the bandwidth or disk space to transfer full sites.

Hope this helps,
Douglas


--

Douglas Hackney
Jamroom Team - Designer/Developer/Support
FAQ-Docs-Help Videos
updated by @douglas: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM

OK I'll ask them.
updated by @isleander: 12/29/14 09:23:54AM