Monday 28 May 2012

Video-uploading to blogger: problem and solution

Being by no means an experienced blogger before embarking on this project, I played around with blogger before starting this blog, and managed to upload pictures, slideshows, collages and a short test video from the word go. However, when trying to upload the longer video of the interview with Elmi Bester, I was unable to upload it. I tried several times, trying to upload the same clip directly from my camera; when that failed to work I tried uploading it from a folder on my hard drive. Nothing worked. The blogger wheel indicating that the upload was in progress, just kept turning and turning.....taking more than 30 minutes for a 2-minute clip. Surely this could not be the correct procedure? But why was it failing to upload......the shorter test video a few days earlier had not given any problems whatsoever?!

I then turned to google and was amazed (but pleased) to find that video-uploading troubles to blogger was a very common problem. A variety of suggestions were given: try a different browser; Google chrome was supposedly a better option (tried and it did not work; it was however an improvement in that it immediately informed me that my upload was not successful); use the updated blogger interface (no success), try at a less busy time of day (tried on a Sunday 8.30am, no success), the problem might be with the country you are posting from (nothing I could do about that), turning off the pop-up blocker, clearing the cache and disabling plugins as suggested also had no effect: the video clip was still not uploading to blogger.

Finally, 48 hours after first attempting to upload the clip, I stumbled upon a posting in a blog where the author claimed that he was able to upload clips smaller than 60MB to blogger; clips bigger than that had to be uploaded to youtube first and then embedded to blogger. This youtube procedure was also suggested by other troubled bloggers; this was however the first posting addressing clip size and giving me a logical explanation of why my shorter clip was uploading and not the longer clip. A-HA!!

The clip was then uploaded to my youtube account, and then embedded via html-code to blogger. Easy as pie! It worked! I found the physical dimensions of the clip to be just a bit too big for the blog and was able to trim it to a preferred size.

“Problems are Only Opportunities in Work Clothes.” Henry J. Kaiser

3 comments:

Martie said...

Thanks for also providing the solution. So often we just hear about the constraints!

Nonna Rose said...

I don't want my video on youtube, so now what?

Unknown said...

Which video are you referring to?