Hello,
I’m in the development phase of a video training website. The site works as expected when running via Freeway Pro; however, when I upload to a site for further evaluation, some of the videos will not load and are replaced with a ‘Q’ with a question mark.
Site Details:
All videos contained on separate page.
All video pages are duplicates of one starting page.
All video use the ‘QT Reference’ action and the associated 3GP and M4V video files were created by me (did not use the action to ‘Generate’ the videos).
Questions:
Any thoughts on what the problem might be?
Is there a program I can use to figure out what is wrong with the code and/or video that may be causing the problem; i.e., something that will allow me to see potential errors on the web page?
The question mark may mean that the QuickTime plugin cannot find a matching codec (compressor/decompressor) algorithm to match the content presented. Usually this can happen when a pro machine is used to encode a movie and then some unrelated computer (usually a PC) is used to view/test it. The pro machine will have all the bells and whistles installed, and the “amateur” machine will have only the basics.
I don’t have any easy answers for you here; I don’t have a short list of acceptable formats to use. You might want to try using the Action to create the movie versions, since it will stick to the basics, as far as I know. You might also run a test – let the Action do the encoding for you, then open the movie on the same machine in QuickTime Pro, and use the media inspector to find out the precise encoding used for both the video and the audio. Make those choices in your encoding app and try again using your favorite encoder.
Another possible reason is that the reference movie refers to a movie that doesn’t exist where the reference thinks it is. That’s not very likely if you used the Action to create the reference movie, but I point it out for completeness.
Walter
On Oct 3, 2011, at 8:55 AM, GregB wrote:
Hello,
I’m in the development phase of a video training website. The site works as expected when running via Freeway Pro; however, when I upload to a site for further evaluation, some of the videos will not load and are replaced with a ‘Q’ with a question mark.
It might be worth giving them a call and finding out if there’s anything they can see at their end because, as far as I can tell, everything is set correctly in the HTML.
Joe
On 3 Oct 2011, at 13:55, GregB wrote:
Hello,
I’m in the development phase of a video training website. The site works as expected when running via Freeway Pro; however, when I upload to a site for further evaluation, some of the videos will not load and are replaced with a ‘Q’ with a question mark.
Site Details:
All videos contained on separate page.
All video pages are duplicates of one starting page.
All video use the ‘QT Reference’ action and the associated 3GP and M4V video files were created by me (did not use the action to ‘Generate’ the videos).
Questions:
Any thoughts on what the problem might be?
Is there a program I can use to figure out what is wrong with the code and/or video that may be causing the problem; i.e., something that will allow me to see potential errors on the web page?
Hi Joe,
Thanks; however, I still get the Q w/ ? even when I navigate directly to the page. I’m going to try removing the QT action and see if that fixes it.
Hi Walter,
Thanks - I am using a pro system and it has all the bells and whistles. I always try to follow the rules when encoding - sometimes, though, one slips by. My problems started when I chose to use the QT action. I’ll give your suggestions a try as well as removing the action altogether and see what happens.
P.S. The site noted above is the one I want to add the check box when the video has been viewed - that’s another thread, though.
Of the 6 videos Insulfator, CCU and Image Capture all work while the other 3 give me the Question mark.
One thing I would say is that some of your movie file names contain space characters. I would recommend that you change them (either remove spaces or replace with hyphens or underscores)
Hello Everyone,
I removed the QT action, reloaded and now they work. Not sure if it’s just a coincidence. I also uploaded to the site via Freeway vs. using Filezilla (which I had been using) - not sure if this had anything to do with it. But alas, they are working.
Hi Dave,
Yes, I renamed as you suggested; although, one of the problem videos was only 1 word. Problems like these are why I have very little hair left on my head!
Yes it may not have been a contributory factor in this case but some servers will baulk at space characters (and other unsafe characters) that is why you should stick to alphanumerics, underscores, hyphens and tilde in file names.
