I've been duped, or at least I feel like I have been. On the project page for CDN2, there is an official release with the assuring green "Recommended for Drupal 6".

I visited http://www.workhabit.com/products/cdn2 and saw "Order Now, Instant Setup", along with the list of great features. Wow! I've been waiting for something like this, so I'm ready!

I followed the guide at http://www.workhabit.com/products/cdn2/guide, including surrendering my credit card number, and was able to get CDN2 integrated into my Drupal site without any problems.

Now, on to uploading! I uploaded my first video and watched patiently as the progress bar made it's way across my screen. Done! I know I'll have to wait for transcoding to complete, but that's fine... A check in the watchdog shows the XMLRPC has been hit -- my video is done!

WRONG. Everything appears to work fine, yet I am not able to play a video. On top of that, I see two bugs, which I consider to be MAJOR flaws:

... along with a handful of other issues, all of which have not seen attention in months!

What a disappointment. I would like to suggest that you print right on the front page of the project "This module is incomplete, and the backend service is still in Alpha!" or something to that effect so that other people don't get the impressions that this is ready to use. Also, I think you should remove the official release from the project page and ONLY maintain a dev version. As it is, the entire project is all talk and no walk and it appears there is very little development going on. Even the CDN2 blog hasn't seen a post since December! C'mon, guys!

I don't mean to complain, but I figured I may as well share this in case the developers might find it somehow constructive. I'll hold out to see if this improves, but it won't be long before I decide to ask that my account be deleted so I won't be charged anymore.

Comments

MaffooClock’s picture

MaffooClock commented

Woops. To be fair:

When I mentioned that the blog hadn't been updated since December, I was looking at the Business blog at http://www.workhabit.com/blog. I found the Labs blog at http://www.workhabit.com/labs and saw an update about CDN2 had been posted on March, albeit with a tagline "Long time no see!" Well, I see!

Kyle Browning et. al. must be on vacation.

[sigh...]

kylebrowning’s picture

kylebrowning commented

Can you be more clear on, cannot play video?
Is the video showing up?
Does the play button just not work?
Any chance I can see a url to the site?

MaffooClock’s picture

MaffooClock commented

#531224: Videos are not found

IncrediblyKenzi’s picture

IncrediblyKenzi commented

Matthew,

There's no need for attacks or vehemence; a lot of developers have put their heart and soul (myself included) to get this service up and running for the drupal community. Just last week I added a patch to our backend to support 16:9 formats for non-hd video. We are actively working on the platform; I'm sorry if you don't feel that to be the case.

That being said, I'm happy to help you out as much as I will support any user of drupal or our CDN2 platform.

The problem you're running into currently is that you're uploading an AVI file that is encoded with 8 bits per sample, which isn't supported by FFMpeg. While I KNOW that error handling could be better in this case, there's not much I can do about the encoding issue since it's a bug (read: feature) in ffmpeg's software.

As a possible solution, if you have a different format you can try converting your video to, the transcoding process should complete properly.

The specific output for your video:

Input #0, avi, from '/usr/share/tomcat5/temp/717e4ab4-7950-11de-a954-3ba2386d8f5e54572.tmp':
  Duration: 00:00:36.00, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 4752 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 320x240, 30.00 tb(r)
    Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_u8, 16000 Hz, mono, s16, 128 kb/s
Output #0, flv, to '/usr/share/tomcat5/temp/717e4ab4-7950-11de-a954-3ba2386d8f5e54572_Flash_Video_
high_resolution.flv':
    Stream #0.0: Video: flv, yuv420p, 320x240, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 25.00 tb(c)
    Stream #0.1: Audio: libmp3lame, 22050 Hz, mono, s16, 0 kb/s (auto)
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Audio resampler only works with 16 bits per sample, patch welcome.

Again, we're TOTALLY willing to help diagnose issues with CDN2 and offer solutions.

IncrediblyKenzi’s picture

IncrediblyKenzi commented
Title: It isn't clear that this project doesn't work, yet » CDN2 Video module doesn't properly report error status when unsupported audio codecs are submitted
Assigned: Unassigned » IncrediblyKenzi
MaffooClock’s picture

MaffooClock commented

Wow... "attacks or vehemence"? I agree, there is no need for such things. Looking back, I suppose using the words "you" and "your" along with a person's name might be cause for defensiveness.

Glad to hear that you are actively working on the platform. So if bug reports are to sit in the queue for months (which is acceptable as long as the project is new and ongoing), why not more frequent blog posts or something? I've been waiting for something like this for a while, and your project is definately helping to keep Drupal ahead of all others. But what am I (and all others) supposed to think when all available information is months old? Do you see where I'm coming from?

I've known a lot of software programmers over the years who are only concerned that their code works -- works, as in "executes properly". But as far as completeness and suitability for a particular use, sometimes those guys were clueless. Now, I'm not saying you are of that type of programmer. My intent for opening this support request was to walk you through the experience of someone other than you, a user, is having. The idea was that you would take that and use it to improve your project as you go along. You know, some things to think about -- afterall, applications development is ultimately about the users, not the sequence of operation.

And I was serious when I suggested that some kind of conspicuous note be placed on the project page saying the CDN platform is in Alpha. And while that's the case, I would only make available the dev version of the module; make it clear that testing and development is ongoing and that this isn't ready for use on production sites. But, what do I know? I'm no Drupal developer, so I'm fairly certain that I don't have not even a clue of what I am talking about.

I wish you wouldn't accuse me of attacking or being vehement, but I do appreciate you taking the time to at least address the problem at #531224: Videos are not found. I took significant time and great care into investigating the resistance I had and to try to report my experience and ideas for your benefit. I also made sure that the video encoding problem was a separate bug from my experience report.

As for the video encoding problem, I copied your reply to the original bug report.

IncrediblyKenzi’s picture

IncrediblyKenzi commented

Hey Matthew,

The platform has been, and will continue to be, in beta until issues are resolved. I apologize if the amount of communication to our customers isn't up to par; we're actively working on that as well as the actual product.

I'm sorry if I called you out too harshly.. What I saw was a HUGE amount of negativity toward this project and what felt like an unprovoked attack. I can clearly see that you are acting in the best interests of the community, so I will retract my previous statement :).

As to marking the product "Alpha," I disagree that the product is in that state. I'm happy to give it the beta moniker that was intended, however.

As for the issue regarding node edits, this has been a known issue for a while, and there has been suggested a workaround: that of creating videos as a separate node and using node-reference to refer to them.

We have quite a few people on the platform in production, and with the exception of a couple of hiccups and a few actively pursued bugs, we haven't had a lot of complaints.

Again, I appreciate the feedback; please keep it coming; we're ramping up for another release soon that will address some of the error handling and upload/transcoding concerns, as well as providing a more comprehensive api for interacting with the service.