We’re semi-frequently getting requests from producers and artists where transcoding of uploaded media appears to have failed. At present with cloud-hosted there is zero visibility on what media is in the transcoder queue, how long transcoding might take, whether or not transcoding failed etc.
What is everyone else’s experience of transcoding media? It seems like a few other people have reported issues with it, e.g. here, here and here.
It seems like a simple UI on the current state of the transcoder would remove a lot of the guesswork in finding out what happened to the uploaded media.
Hey Ed, good timing. We’ve just released the Site Activity Monitor, which includes - amongst other functionality - visibility on your sites transcoding. It’s our first attempt at this kind of service and it doesn’t show all of the metrics you’ve asked for, but give it a look, and let me know your feedback.
actually… looks like I got too excited… it doesn’t appear to be working lol
I’m seeing zero jobs processed no matter what filters I put in. Is this app so newly released that it hasn’t started populating data yet? Or is there something else going wrong here…? Haven’t had time to read through the full documentation yet, but the app is enabled and working, but when I apply a filter to a page I know for a fact had a version with a movie uploaded to it in the last 7 days I’m still seeing zero jobs processed. Any ideas?
in general for the transcoder issue at hand, it seems to give a sort of sysadmin overview of general resource consumption, but doesn’t seem seem to give any granularity on individual jobs. Our issue is that a producer or artist will ask about why version x of shot y still has no thumbnail, which we still can’t really answer from the information on this site activity monitor.
Also the filter by page id feature is nice in theory, but is quite hard to use without a lot of back and forth trying to find a suitable page’s id. It looks like the selectable page ids are version list pages per project? Would be good to see a page name instead of just ids to filter by.
Hey @Ed-Spencer - thanks for the feedback and sorry it’s not operating as expected - it should definitely be populating with data. At this point, I’d recommend submitting a support ticket with specifics so we can dive in and check this out in more detail.
The Transcoder data in the Site Activity Monitor is also not working for our site either.
@Ed-Spencer We’ve also seen spotty failures from the transcoder. Most recently a few days ago Versions had their sg_uploaded_movie_transcoding_status set to 0 (In Progress) and then not change from there for several days. I imagine this is why there is a Jobs failure rate on the Site Activity Monitor @Mason ?
My question is, ok if failures are expected, what’s the process to retrigger the transcode? I mean I know how we do it, but it’s very much a case of step by step identifying the affected Versions by checking the image and sg_uploaded_movie_transcoding_status fields, then re-downloading the media in the sg_uploaded_movie field (because of reasons) then re-uploading it to the same field. Any way to shortcut this?
Hi folks. Apologies for the disruption - we discovered an issue with how we were pulling data into the SAM from our monitoring tools. That should be fixed, and your transcoding showing as expected.
@Halil , did not know there was a transcoding status field on versions! And after a bit of digging I know why I didn’t know… it doesn’t seem to show up as an available field for display on versions, despite permissions role having view and edit permissions on that field. I can see events triggers by that field changing though…
So at least we could write a webhook that manages re-upload (I guess this is what you’re doing already), but yeah - I would second that request for a shortcut here. There should at least be some kind of ‘retry transcode’ policy, like attempt to transcode x times before finally failing.
@Mason , thanks for the update, can confirm the SAM transcoder page is now populating with data. However it doesn’t seem to work if I put in a page filter, it just goes blank.