Finally got it working.. here's how!

mrroyce
(@mrroyce)

13 years, 2 months ago

Hi there, I see some of the issues people are having here and I thought I would show what I had to do to get it working.

1. At first, the plugin wouldn’t find any of my videos in the bucket. I triple checked the keys, but it still couldn’t find the videos. I then remembered that I had used the same s3.php program for other projects, so I copied the main source in github.com,

https://raw.github.com/anthony-mills/s3-video/master/s3-video.php

and compared them. They were different so I simply overlayed the version in the plugin with the latest version from github. The videos now appeared for me! I have no idea how it worked for others, but that is what I had to do to get them to appear.

2. Now the problem was to get the videos to play! After many failed efforts, I took a look at the source code. For some unknown reason, the generated URL’s weren’t correct. Again, I have no idea how others got the videos to play, or if there was something different about my setup, S3 account, etc. but I had to change the URL format in s3-video.php. I had to change it in 4 places (lines 316, 352, 360, and 452). The existing URL had the bucket name before the Amazon URL which just didn’t work??? I edited those lines to put the amazon_url before the video bucket. Something like:

'http://' . $pluginSettings['amazon_url'] .'/'. $pluginSettings['amazon_video_bucket'] . '/' .

Now finally I wasn’t getting the failure messages.
3. My last issue was the type of video. I was testing with some old .wmv videos I had but those didn’t work at all. I then tried a .flv video and that worked fine! I never did get the preview button in the admin of the plugin to work, but the shortcode on a page worked.
4. Make sure you just use the bucket name (exact spelling, punctuation) in the plugin settings. Even if you create folders within the bucket to organize your videos, don’t put the folder names. The plugin will find the subfolders.
5. You can possibly use the Amazon S3 bucket policy to restrict hotlinking, etc. The free S3 explorer from cloudberry.com can also generate a timed Web URL.

I’ve been a developer for many decades and have used Amazon S3 successfully many times. I was somewhat surprised when this didn’t work out of the box. Hopefully this can help others. Anthony, if you see anything crazy, please chime in!

http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/plugins/s3-video/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

rayfellers
(@rayfellers)

13 years, 1 month ago

I really appreciate the time and effort you put in to helping others make this plugin work. There are several points I hope you can clarify.

I made the changes in the S3-video.php file from github. The line numbers were different (off by a few lines in my copy).

In the plugin settings, I’m not at all sure what the “Video Bucket” entry should look like. My bucket is named lonestarlostandfound but should the name in that field be exactly like I see it in my S3 bucket list, which is /lonestarlostandfound/ or lonestarlostandfound without the slashes?

Secondly, the plugin says I can’t proceed with setup because I don’t have a playlist. Why do I need a playlist? Doesn’t that imply that my videos will come from those stored on my server rather than from my S3 account?

It’s a shame that such a potentially useful plugin seems to be more or less abandoned by the developer.

Looking forward to seeing a reply from you as you seem to know as much about the plugin as the author.

Thread Starter mrroyce
(@mrroyce)

13 years, 1 month ago

Hi there, wow.. I just re-read my post and realized that I linked to the wrong program. I meant to link to the original s3.php program that the plugin uses:

S3.php

Sorry about that, that is the program that is used in the includes directory of s3-video. If you compare those, you will notice that they are different. I’m not sure how major the differences are, but as soon as I overlayed that program, my videos at least showed up in the listing.

Also, Safari and iPad requires files in the h.264 .m4v format, not .mp4!! This plugin has a specific list of file types that it looked for so the .m4v files would never even show up!! At this point I was ready to start writing my own code for this function.

All that being said, I eventually gave up on this plugin when I noticed that it didn’t work on Safari on my MacBook or on my iPad! Digging around the source code again showed that the format to display videos on is different than what is shown on Apple’s documentation:

Using HTML5 Video

I guess Firefox and Chrome are less strict in what they require, but Safari and the iPad need the HTML in a very specific format. I could have continued hacking this plugin, but I eventually gave up and went with a different product S3 Media Maestro that worked right out of the box. It’s a paid plugin, but I had already spent way too much time trying to get my videos to display, and I was desperate for a solution. Oh yea, I sent a note to the plugins author at 10:15pm and got a response about 15 minutes later. I even got a short discussion going with him that night, so the support is top notch. 😉

Thread Starter mrroyce
(@mrroyce)

13 years, 1 month ago

Sorry for you specific questions,

1. do NOT use the slashes in the bucket name!
2. I don’t know what the problem is with the playlist, I didn’t have that issue, you may want to grab the entire new version from github and test that version, although I have no idea if it is ready to be distributed.

Plugin Author Anthony Mills
(@anthony_mills)

13 years, 1 month ago

Hi Guys,
@mrroyce nice write up I am glad you got your issues fixed. The plugin code often differs between here and the github repo. Development takes place on github then normally I deploy as an update when enough changes have been made to warrant a new release.

Not sure why you would have to change the order of the elements in the s3 code can you tell me what region your S3 bucket is in? I will do some experimentation with this to see if it differs at all as i haven’t encountered any issues with the format using the US west coast version.

@rayfellers The bucket name needs to be entered without. On the issue of support, I never seem to get emails from the wordpress support forums when people open an issue. People often contact me through the github page or email me directly for assitance which tends to work better. I do endevour to check the plugin page periodically but the plugin is free, I recieve nothing from it so paid work in my life has to take precendence as its what pays the bills.

Cheers

Anthony

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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