Richard Walker.Travel Log

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Youtube uploading is a piece of shit

Excuse my language but I felt the need for an offensive title due to high levels of frustration.

Uploading videos to youtube, the number 1 video sharing site in the world is far from adequate. Ranjene and I wasted half a day yesterday trying to upload videos with very limited success.

I am a big user of flickr and the difference between it and youtube in terms of uploading content is night and day. Flickr has great 3rd party uploading tools and also tools made by flickr to bulk upload your images and video to their site. Even uploading images using a browser right on their website is a pretty painless experience with lots of nice feedback.

On the other hand I can't find a reliable uploading program for youtube, I tried a handful of programs I did find and they either didn't work or didn't work reliably. Why hasn't youtube made such an app?

Furthermore the uploading experience in a browser at youtube.com is pretty horrible. Even the newer bulk file uploader didn't want to work reliably for us and there was no way to delete a clip once added to the cue (and this is before you tell it to start uploading) The bulk uploader uses google gears and I suspect this may have been part of our problem on Ranjene's computer. But why'd they use this whole plugin business anyway? Can't we just have a desktop app to bulk upload with? I want to be able to tag and label all my uploads, resume if something fails, save my session for later etc. Google please just copy the flickr uploader it's pretty much perfect.

Next we come to single file uploads in a webbrowser, they don't provide you any progress feedback so you have no idea how much has been uploaded and in our case you don't know that the file upload has actually failed or got stuck which brings me to the most annoying part of the whole experience.

We have a less than stellar connection here and it does weird things at times, (I can't for example download my latest ipod update from apple as it always fails somewhere along the way) but youtube was unable to give me any feedback about the status of my uploads or the fact that they had actually failed, nor was I able to go back and edit information about a clip once it had got to this stuck state nor even to restart the upload or pause for the matter or anything, it's just a crap web uploading interface. I mean come on? it's youtube! Most of the services I use on the web now have good responsive feedback providing user interfaces and/or desktop tools associated with them that I can use instead.

Arrrrgggggg

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been having the same problems uploading videos to youtube. Have you found a solution yet?

Richie said...

to be honest, no. Sometimes it seems to work ok and sometimes it just hangs during upload or fails or does nothing. I try with different browsers and in different locations. Its incredibly frustrating that they have such terrible uploading tools.. grrr.

Anonymous said...

same here dude, it is a piece of shit. I am trying to send single videos and I am not happy

Richie said...

i hear you, they have just introduced a version 2 of their uploader which actually shows progress which is definitely a welcome change, however it can still hang randomly. At least now you can see that its hung I spose.. sigh

Popov said...

The uploading is horrible. Just horrible. I'm trying to upload a video file for whole day now and including last night. This is the sixth time I'm trying to upload it. Each fail took 2 to 3 hours of my life. The video is about 220 MB big and 9 minutes long. Im using the bulk uploader and my upload gets stuck.. first time on 95%, second time on 50%, then 70% and now on 94%. As i got deeper in to the problem, after the upload gets stucked i noticed that my computer is still sending the data??!.. So i left the uploading stuck on 50% and came back later and saw that it was on 70%..but stuck AGAIN...So what happens? Youtube begins to re-upload the file form the begning!! And the number of percent % stays the same where it got stuck. And when it reaches the number where it's got, stuck it continiues on. Unbelieveble.. It will take more than 24 HRS to upload a 220 mb file to youtube..but again that is not possible for me because my ISP resets the IP adress every 24HRS..Damn YOUTUBE and their shitty upload system.. Get a resume feature!! Especially now when the HD option is used more and more every day! And i have a toothache. I HATE THE WORLD NOW BECAUSE OF THEM.

Anonymous said...

Amen...this is a real PITA!!! Oddly I was just awarded a patent with my company on a methodology of video transcoding and sending and can tell you that what we've implemented blows away what they are trying to do. I can guarantee we have nowhere near the resources that Youtube/Google has. The fact that it can't resume uploads is amazing especially in light of HD and increased file sizes!

Sean

Unknown said...

You guys are right about the resume feature. I attempted to upload an HD video I created which was about 1.26gb. It 3 hours+ to upload, it reached the end fine and then when I went to check on the status, it read "Failed (upload aborted by user)" I find that amazing as it reached 100% and it said complete. I switched formats, went from wmv to mpg and reduce the file size to 50% but still remaining HD, it was now 548mb. I uploaded again, 1 hour 58 minutes at the end, it said Error. I gave up and decided not to upload anything. To wait that long and then find out you had some kind of error, thats crazy, specially when you can't resume an upload at all. We should all know that resuming is a must, downloads are normally faster than uploading so why not have ability to resume an upload and save us massive head aches?

Richie said...

Yea, although I have seen very minor improvements over the past while in the uploader it still continues to disappoint. Flickr has such a great little uploading app, its baffling that youtube hasn't come out with something similar for their videos.

RomeRun said...

Sigh.., I have about 15 1G files of 720p HD video. It'll take me weeks to complete uploading, I guess...

Yes, uploading HD without resuming ability is FAIL. Internet uploading speed is so far back from nowadays media file size.

*~\[ Yuga ☼ Sunshine ]/~* said...

I tried using Free YouTube uploader... that sucks!

Richie said...

Yea ive tried all kinds of apps hoping to find something like what flickr has for uploading images and videos to its site but alas ive found nothing that works particularly well or offers the same kind of features... urrrg

Anonymous said...

yes YOU TUBE upload is a piece of shit!! I got disconnected and I had to re-do the FUCKING UPload again, its such a freaking waste of time grrr

Billigflüge said...

damnit, same here... tried to upload 300mb-files for the last two days but it won't work at all. Does anybody know an alternative uploader with resume-feature?

Anonymous said...

Yeah right, kapag may sumpong ang internet (when the internet is inconsistent), I have to restart all over, even if it is 99% complete! I remember uploading a 300MB hulk that took so many tries, and when it did upload, it said that it was rejected because there was a phantom duplicate that didn't exist! I joked that if there was sumpong and I was uploading a longplay via FTP to WOL, the whole longplay would be first!!!!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Why does everyone try to reinvent the wheel. FTP has always worked great why cant we have access to FTP upload a file to youtube?????