SOLVED Video upload failing with unknown error

[ianhyzy]

I'm trying to upload a 2.5GB video to PeerTube. When I do, it upload to about 25% and then fails with "Unknown error". There's some old GitHub posts that say it's an nginx config change that can help but it's not clear: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1359

[girish]

@ianhyzy Cloudron's nginx does not have a upload limit (client_max_body_size is 0 i.e unlimited). So, this is either coming from the app or maybe it's just taking a long time to upload 2.5GB. Are you able to upload smaller videos say 500MB and then 1GB and so on? Might be a good idea to time the uploads as well as I suspect it is probably hitting some peertube frontend timeout.

[ianhyzy]

@girish I uplaoded a small 3MB video as a test with no issues

[ianhyzy]

@ianhyzy this is what shows up in the dev console. It was roughly 60 seconds so it may be a timeout thing.

[girish]

@ianhyzy I tried to upload a big video file here ~600MB (big buck bunny) and this takes forever. What I recommend is to maybe upload it to some file server and then import via URL - https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use-create-upload-video . If you don't have a file server, you can install surfer and scp the file into it's data directory and then surfer will give you a public link that you can put inside peertube. Somehow, I don't think browsers are meant to upload such large files reliably.

@nebulon how did you manage to import the large videos in our peertube instance?

[nebulon]

@girish actually I just uploaded via the browser. Depending on upstream bandwidth it takes a bit, but I just left it in the background. None of those videos were over 1Gb though.

[ianhyzy]

I found the solution to this: give peertube more RAM (and possibly, pre-transcode video to MP4 so the server doesn't have to)

[nebulon]

@ianhyzy did it generally fail without the app being restarted due to running out of memory? If so this makes it harder to detect that, or what was the clue in your case?

[ianhyzy]

@nebulon Peertube only gave me the OOM error very recently, it wasn't doing it before. After bumping up both the CPU and RAM it will still error on large videos it has to transcode, but I can pre-transcode them to h264/aac and it will upload fine (I just have to find a way to rip the subtitles too)