Problems with video

Had a real journey this morning trying post a video. I tried to publish a 17-second .mov video file (22mb) in a post today. I am able to upload it. The blue progress bar seems to reach completion (but I don’t get a confirmation that it’s uploaded and don’t see a preview of the video in the post), and I’m able to hit “publish” with no errors. But the video is not in the post.

Something similar happens when I just try to upload the file in “uploads” - the progress bar seems to go all the way to the right, but nothing happens.

I saw a different help item from January wherein you suggested a “hack” by renaming the source file with a different extension. That allowed me to upload the file and hand-code the video into the post, but…that seems like a lot of work for microblogging.

The only way I could get the video to post in a “normal” sort of way was via the Sunlit app. But that the video is SUPER compressed, even though it’s well within the size limits you specify. I ended up going back and hand coding the video html.

This experience was frustrating. I would be fine relying on Sunlit if you didn’t compress the video if it was within the size limits. Otherwise, just understanding what’s going on with those progress-bars-that-aren’t would be great. Thanks.


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If I had to guess, because .mov is not well supported on the web, it may not be supported properly here. You probably need a .mp4 not a .mov file.

The example given in the help page for this feature uses .mov, so I suspect that’s not the issue? If I have time I will try a different format, though.

Very few browsers other than Apple’s own Safari support their .mov container format.

Because QuickTime support is, for all intents and purposes, primarily available on Apple devices, it is no longer widely used on the internet. Apple itself generally now uses MP4 for video.

Media container formats (file types)

So, the documentation should probably be updated to use .mp4 to avoid confusion.

I was able to upload an .mp4 without an issue (thanks). My point about compression remains, however. The level of compression currently being applied seemingly to all uploads - even small ones - is intense. It would be great if files within whatever size/length constraints micro.blog specifies could be uploaded without compression. Would make video more useful here. Thanks for my TED Talk.

I agree, right now Micro.blog processes all video even if it doesn’t technically need to fit within the 75 MB upload limit. I’ll fix this.

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I’m seeing problems with video uploads from my iPhone 16 Pro too, so I think something new is broken. As a work-around, you may need to export video to .mp4 or .m4v and then upload on the web with Micro.blog. We’ll get this fixed as soon as we can.