Uploading videos from iPhoto/iMovie to MobileMe Galery

Hi,

I would like to know how everyone else manages.

I am off sick at the moment and so had the time, but would just like everyone to know that it has taken me THREE days to upload 6 (quite short) movies from iMovie to my MobileMe Gallery.

Here were the problems :

* TERRIBLE connection to MobileMe Gallery (I live in Belgium and the server I must use is in The Netherlands, judging from the flag that appears in my Firefox toolbar). The connection failed on about 90% of all my attempts to upload and a warning appeared : "Your MobileMe Gallery is temporarily not accessible : please check your settings and internet connection and try again."
* Once I had managed to upload 2 movies from iPhoto, I discovered, when following the links sent via Mac Mail "Tell a Friend" that the videos were a) impossible to play on my own Mac b) invisible (i.e. did not show up at all) on a PC
* It took me hours of googling to discover that it is better to upload from iMovie (because of movie formats), so I started again.
* The uploads worked only sporadically from iMovie because of the very slow connection mentioned in my first point. Mostly, the upload simply failed with the message 'An error occurred during upload. Please try again.'
* Sometimes an upload just got stuck at either 4 minutes or 6 minutes to go, resulting in the same error message.
* The smaller the size I chose, the less difficult (I won't say "easy" as nothing in this experience was "easy") the upload was. 'Tiny' worked best. 'Mobile' wasn't too bad. 'Large' was always impossible. 'Medium' (perhaps the most useful size?) was very difficult and normally just hung at the 4 or 6 minutes to go level.
* One particular video (33 seconds long!) proved IMPOSSIBLE to upload in anything except 'tiny' or 'mobile' size. It took 3 hours on one day, 7 hours on another and 3 hours this morning before I finally managed to persuade the application to publish the video successfully to my MobileMe account. There seemed to be no explanation for the problems and no solutions : just hit and miss.

I tried the following, though none of it really helped :

* setting the iPhoto web preference check to manual (as I found in one post after extensive googling)
* deleting the iMovie project and starting again
* rebooting my computer after a hang (which seemed to increase chances of success, or was that just chance??)
* editing the iMovie project from every conceivable point of view
* renaming my iMovie project
* choosing ONLY 'tiny' or ONLY 'mobile' or ONLY 'medium size - but all failed, until one magic moment this morning, 13 hours of work later, when for no particular reason, I was able to upload a 'mobile' size for the video (but still impossible to upload 'medium')

Personally, I think this service (remember : we are paying extra for it!) is unacceptable.

Has anyone any thoughts or tips for another time before I give up on MobileMe Gallery?

Thanks!

Why not give a call to Apple Belgium and see if they have any suggestions? I use MobileMe Gallery all the time and love it, but I have a fast connection in Canada.

The problems you are blaming on MobileMe seem to be entirely based on your connection speed, not MobileMe. You may want to chat with your ISP about that as well, some accounts are very, very slow uploading (particularly compared to downloading) and have "caps" that limit upload speed to thwart pirating.

Hi
Thank you very much for your reply. At your suggestion, I was able to contact Apple Belgium MobileMe Gallery chat... and the VERY helpful person spent more than an hour with me trying to sort out the problem.
It turns out to be an engineering problem their end, and I will be helped between 24-48 hours from now.
I will post the solution when it arrives in case anyone else suffers the same problem.
Thanks again!
Best wishes from Brussels!

Unacceptable MobileMe performance

I am a long time user of MobileMe in the UK and, lately, I have experienced totally unacceptable performance when trying to upload even quite small movies to my MobileMe Gallery. The movies are produced in Final Cut Express and sent to QuickTime Player, from whence they are sent using 'Share' to the MobileMe Gallery. The movies takes a very long time to upload: first there are several hours of slow progress (much slower than previously encountered) and then, when it gets almost to the end of the upload and says '5 seconds to go', it hangs!! A message eventually appears saying: 'The uploaded file could not be identified on the MobileMe server. The MobileMe server returned invalid data.' I have also tried with iWeb and get similar results.

If ant1060 did receive a solution to his problem or if anyone else has comments, I would be most grateful

First thing I would do is test your upload speed using something like speedtest.net. It could be that your upload speed is very poor (though I'd be shocked if it was THAT poor!)

If it turns out our upload speeds are terrible, that's a call to your ISP to sort that out. If they're not terrible, you might (as I suggested above) give Apple a ring.

Also, try using an FTP program to uploading the movie to your iDisk (in, say, Movies). This won't put it on the Gallery but should give you an alternate method to help determine if the problem is with QuickTime or your connection or MobileMe generally.

Thanks

Thanks very much Chas.

I have checked the upload speed and it is reasonable, so I do not think this is the problem. I will try out what you suggest.

I use DropBox quite a lot and this is very fast for transferring files to others with whom I share. But I like the concept of MobileMe and I am frustrated that is now not working well. I think it may well be that the problem is the Apple server because others have complained about it. If DropBox can be so fast transferring large files, using the same ISP, I think MobileMe should not have the problems I am experiencing. Apple needs to look into this or it may tend to lose long-time friends in the UK, such as me.

Best wishes and thanks again,

Peter

Hi

I have exactly the same problems as ant1060, though I have not persevered as long as he did. I use mobileme to store family movies, which vary in length from several seconds to five minutes. I spent from 8pm to midnight trying to upload one, and then left it all night, still to no avail.

Connection speed problem? Yes, I live in rural France and have a minimal speed broadband, but there is no point talking to the service provider because that is a problem with living in the country. However, I have no problem using ftp apps to upload or download big files - I often do it at nighttime so as not to get frustrated. The problem is just with mobileme.

Further, the movies which I succeed in uploading often have buffering problems, not just for me with my poor broadband (but brand new iMac) but for my children in London. The only ones that really work are Small rather than Medium.

In the end my only recourse is to ftp the movies to a website I have elsewhere. But I dont want to do this: more work and anyhow, I so liked the idea of an integrated Mac solution.

I notice that the two other people with problems live in Belgium and the UK. So is there a problem with the mobileme servers in Europe?

Same thing in Germany

Hey everyone!

I just registered to let you know that I'm experiencing just the same as you guys! It's not only France, Belgium or the UK - it's Germany as well, as it seems.

1. Successful upload via iMovie to Mobileme Gallery: Two movies with sizes of 4 MB and 23 MB.

2. Upload fails with movie sizes of 49 MB and 71 MB.

3. Before I knew of the possibility of uploading through iMovie, I just added my movies to iPhoto and then published them from there to Mobileme.
Downsides: The movies are in the photo section (not in the movies section). But in fact, there are no problems at all with any movies, no matter what size.

Since yesterday I've been trying about 10 times to upload the bigger movies. But 3-6 minutes before finishing it goes up to 20, 40, 60 or 80 minutes again.
So frustrating!!!

This is what I tried to make it work:

√ Logout and login again to Mobileme Account
√ Mac restart
√ Uncheck the automatic sync
√ Upload of mobile movie version
√ Quit all other programs that could possibly interfere (Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, Contacts, Skype)

NOTHING solved the problem.

I really have no clue what's going on. So you might be right with some possible problem with the Mobileme servers in Europe.

I'm just gonna stick to my iPhoto solution until there's a solution for the iMovie problem.