8 replies to this topic

[chris mace]

Synopsis: Thumbnail galleries load, thumbs are clickable, loading animation spins, videos do not play (on most computers).
Solution (maybe): Remove tubepress, re-upload, re-implement

We had been experiencing inconsistent performance that did not appear to be browser / JS related. Testing on the same browser / platform combination on different networks produced different results (on one the gallery worked on the other it did not). Sometimes the gallery would work on my development machine sometimes it did not - while other video playback unrelated to tubepress was not affected - no buffering or lag on other video, but couldn't load tubepress videos . . . sometimes.

[chris mace]

Somewhat inexplicably the gallery is now working again. It's possible that removing and re-uploading tubepress to the server resolved the problem although it continued to not function properly for some time after having done that and refreshed the directories involved and emptying cache, etc. So if you're experiencing some inconsistent performance and it does not appear to be browser-related go the basic route and remove everything, reinstall and re-implement and see if it clears the problem up.

[eric]

Thanks for following up. Definitely baffling why it suddenly decided to start working, but fingers crossed it won't break again! If you run into any other trouble just post back here and we'll be glad to assist. Thanks!

[chris mace]

Doh! Problems with our Tubepress gallery have resurfaced, well, for my client they have anyway.

Last week it seemed as though we had resolved an issue where clicking on a gallery thumb would trigger the loading animation but TubePress couldn't pull in the related video to display. After much testing and finally some time having passed after re-uploading / re-implementing the gallery it finally worked consistently across all tested platform / browser combos.

Except now it's not working on my client's PC laptop in IE or FireFox. However it continues to function in FireFox and Safari on my machine.

I'm at a loss as to what might account for the inconsistent performance. Could this be DNS related?

[eric]

A few questions for you...

• Are these YouTube or Vimeo galleries?
• When you say you see the loading animation, are you referring to the "fade to white" that TubePress uses when it switches videos? Or do you mean the actual embedded video player appears to be loading a video?
• Do you see any errors with FireBug?
• Best yet, do you have a link to your site that you could share so we could take a first-hand look?

Hopefully we can get to the root of the issue. Thanks!

[chris mace]

Thank you !

Are these YouTube or Vimeo galleries?

-Youtube

When you say you see the loading animation, are you referring to the "fade to white" that TubePress uses when it switches videos? Or do you mean
the actual embedded video player appears to be loading a video?

-We are using Tinybox, when a thumbnail is clicked a spinning "loading" animation conveys that Tubepress is attempting to load the corresponding video, but that's as far as we get. Tinybox never fires. (This is also the case when specifying shadowbox, as well as when specifying neither lightbox and using the default embedded player. When the player is embedded, the selected video will play but clicking on a thumbnail = no joy.)

Do you see any errors with FireBug?

-Firebug throws a JS error "t is null" (in version 2.2.9 it's "s is null")

Best yet, do you have a link to your site that you could share so we could take a first-hand look?

-http://avianexoticsvet.com/gallery.php

...as I mentioned, the Tubepress gallery is currently working when I test it (but for a few days last week it stopped working - same machine/browser - even while continuing to function as desired in a remote testing environment - crossbrowsertesting.com).

The gallery is not currently working for my client on her PC laptop in IE9 or in FireFox. She two weeks ago updated her flash player. The gallery was working for her last week but was not working for her on Monday when she checked back after someone told her they couldn't view the videos. No changes were made to the implementation or files since it was last working for her. (The gallery is working on a desktop computer she uses that is on the same network.)

[eric]

Weird indeed. I think the only way to really get to the bottom of this is to view the actual response from your server when a user clicks on a thumb. My hunch is that there's an intermittent communication problem between your server and youtube.com. When the site breaks, does it break for everyone? Or just on certain machines?

One other thing that might help, if you haven't already done it, is to enable the TubePress API cache by adding

cacheEnabled="true"

to your shortcodes

[chris mace]

Could this be related to recent changes made to Youtube? I'm trying to find an alternative to Tubepress since I'm at a loss on this issue and I was planning to replace Tubepress with Youtube-generated playlist galleries until I can come up with something else but noticed that Youtube has made a number of API changes. Perhaps there's something related to those changes at issue, possibly?

[eric]

My guess is that if it was related to the YouTube API, then we would be seeing more of a widespread problem (i.e. this forum would be flooded with problems similar to yours).

Another thing that I would be interested in testing, if I were in your shoes, would be to clone the entire site and test it on a completely different server. Have you done this yet? I wonder if the existing server has some issue that's getting in the way?