Sometime last year I started having an issue viewing videos on here. I did leave comments on some of them. I also noticed I wasn't the only one with this problem. I figured someone would have said something so I didn't say anything. I figured it'd get fixed at some point but it never did. I figured it'd get fixed during the maintennence and migration but it never did. I did mention it in the bugs topic and no one acknowledged it. I go to click on a video and when it works it plays as normal. When it's a video that doesn't work the player itself vanishes from the page. https://e621.net/posts/3271345?q=patcheeks https://e621.net/posts/3074436?q=3d_%28artwork%29+foot_fetish+male%2Fmale+duo https://e621.net/posts/3502764 These are only some of the videos that don't work. I know it's not on my end cause they all worked before and work on any other website and even if I download it. It's only on here that they don't work. I hate having to download them just to view them.

Unlike popular belief, staff (and most others) will not read comments or see even fraction of them, so you are basically shouting in void and someone might come and say "well works on my machine".
If any post is broken for you, use "broken/corrupted" flag option. Alternatively bring it up somewhere like discord helpdesk instead.

There's a lot of reasons why uploads here could be unplayable. As this isn't video hosting site, we generally serve the files people upload directly to users, so where with something like newgrounds and youtube the problems usually are gotten rid of during transcoding to samples, we are relying on the uploader knowing what they are doing essentially.

Most common one for iPhone users is that iPhones are the only devices that do not support WebM files, so they rely on sites low quality samples instead. Sometimes there's some hiccup during upload and samples never generate. Janitors can force regenerate them, but there's currently no way to search for posts which don't have them. This was problem with two of the posts you linked and the samples should be generated now.

Another really common problem is with resolution, resolutions that aren't divisible by two. This is actually enforced with h264 codec and you cannot even encode videos like this, with VP9 it's possible, but many players have issues with these files when they were expecting just "normal" file and problems can be from colors being messed up to file not playing at all. This was problem with one of the posts you linked and it's now replaced.

There's even problems with stuff like videos uploaded with surround audio, which show up corrupted when trying to view with firefox so there's a lot of aspects to video files. Luckily many are detected during upload nowdays, rest should be informed in e621:supported_filetypes linked in the upload form, so hopefully most people know what they are doing.

If you still have trouble with some posts feel free to provide the IDs or flag them.

mairo said:
Unlike popular belief, staff (and most others) will not read comments or see even fraction of them, so you are basically shouting in void and someone might come and say "well works on my machine".
If any post is broken for you, use "broken/corrupted" flag option. Alternatively bring it up somewhere like discord helpdesk instead.

There's a lot of reasons why uploads here could be unplayable. As this isn't video hosting site, we generally serve the files people upload directly to users, so where with something like newgrounds and youtube the problems usually are gotten rid of during transcoding to samples, we are relying on the uploader knowing what they are doing essentially.

Most common one for iPhone users is that iPhones are the only devices that do not support WebM files, so they rely on sites low quality samples instead. Sometimes there's some hiccup during upload and samples never generate. Janitors can force regenerate them, but there's currently no way to search for posts which don't have them. This was problem with two of the posts you linked and the samples should be generated now.

Another really common problem is with resolution, resolutions that aren't divisible by two. This is actually enforced with h264 codec and you cannot even encode videos like this, with VP9 it's possible, but many players have issues with these files when they were expecting just "normal" file and problems can be from colors being messed up to file not playing at all. This was problem with one of the posts you linked and it's now replaced.

There's even problems with stuff like videos uploaded with surround audio, which show up corrupted when trying to view with firefox so there's a lot of aspects to video files. Luckily many are detected during upload nowdays, rest should be informed in e621:supported_filetypes linked in the upload form, so hopefully most people know what they are doing.

If you still have trouble with some posts feel free to provide the IDs or flag them.

I'm surprised that's all still an issue in 2023. Sigh...

alphamule said:
I'm surprised that's all still an issue in 2023. Sigh...

Those videos I mentioned as well as the rest I have been having issues with that I didn't mention (forgot which ones they were) have worked just fine before. I'm not the only one with this issue. I know it's a site issue because I don't have this issue anywhere else. They work just fine when I download them. When I'm recording I never save my videos as webms because regardless of platform I've always had issues with them. It baffles me how many issues this site has and no one cares to fix them. It's comparable to a Bethesda game.

sexygaydragon said:
Those videos I mentioned as well as the rest I have been having issues with that I didn't mention (forgot which ones they were) have worked just fine before. I'm not the only one with this issue. I know it's a site issue because I don't have this issue anywhere else. They work just fine when I download them. When I'm recording I never save my videos as webms because regardless of platform I've always had issues with them. It baffles me how many issues this site has and no one cares to fix them. It's comparable to a Bethesda game.

You probably don't have this issue anywhere else because everywhere else transcodes videos to a lower quality without telling you, whereas this is one of the only places left on the internet where you can be served raw files exactly as the uploader rendered them. And it turns out most people don't know how to render videos.

As for downloading them, the video player in your browser is probably worse than whatever dedicated one you use. I know I have videos that cause Firefox to choke but work fine in VLC.

Speaking of Firefox, there was a ~30 version period recently where it would just crash if left running too long, and sometimes this would be preceded by random features ceasing to work (such as the download button no longer opening the download window). Fortunately this seems to have been fixed in the last few months, but I would be wary of blaming the websites I visited for my problems there.

wat8548 said:
You probably don't have this issue anywhere else because everywhere else transcodes videos to a lower quality without telling you, whereas this is one of the only places left on the internet where you can be served raw files exactly as the uploader rendered them. And it turns out most people don't know how to render videos.

As for downloading them, the video player in your browser is probably worse than whatever dedicated one you use. I know I have videos that cause Firefox to choke but work fine in VLC.

Speaking of Firefox, there was a ~30 version period recently where it would just crash if left running too long, and sometimes this would be preceded by random features ceasing to work (such as the download button no longer opening the download window). Fortunately this seems to have been fixed in the last few months, but I would be wary of blaming the websites I visited for my problems there.

I used to use PlayerXtreme but haven't needed it for awhile. I've been using unzip to view the videos that didn't work. Had to modify the file type as webm isn't one of the free options.

Considering it's the only site I've been having this issue with and I'm not the only one I think it's a safe bet it's an issue with the site. I don't know why I even bothered to bring it to attention. Clearly there's no interest in fixing anything.

alphamule said:
I'm surprised that's all still an issue in 2023. Sigh...

I did wrote about many things, so I'm not sure what you are referring to specifically.

sexygaydragon said:
Those videos I mentioned as well as the rest I have been having issues with that I didn't mention (forgot which ones they were) have worked just fine before. I'm not the only one with this issue. I know it's a site issue because I don't have this issue anywhere else. They work just fine when I download them. When I'm recording I never save my videos as webms because regardless of platform I've always had issues with them. It baffles me how many issues this site has and no one cares to fix them. It's comparable to a Bethesda game.

sexygaydragon said:
I used to use PlayerXtreme but haven't needed it for awhile. I've been using unzip to view the videos that didn't work. Had to modify the file type as webm isn't one of the free options.

Considering it's the only site I've been having this issue with and I'm not the only one I think it's a safe bet it's an issue with the site. I don't know why I even bothered to bring it to attention. Clearly there's no interest in fixing anything.

...how is it issue with the site?
If we disregard sampling (which you can toggle from your user settings) then the .webm file that's uploaded is exactly the same .webm file you are downloading. Only thing the site can do is enforce that it's encoded in a manner that should be standard, which we already do and I'm enforcing: e621:supported_filetypes
So essentially only thing the site does is take the uploaded .webm file and embed it on the page using <video> HTML tag, that's basically all there is to it. This isn't video hosting site like Youtube or Newgrounds, so we aren't universally transcoding everything and that's also why we have 100MB filesize limit, instead of gigabytes.

I have checked the files you linked, after that one comment you made 6 days ago, all of these posts were missing samples and one had resolution error that I replaced. But you are still saying you are still having issues with these posts? Because if you are still saying there's still problems, I can check again.
post #3271345, post #3074436, post #3502764 and post #2995468

You have not even disclosed what hardware you have, but I only have to assume iPhone, at which point the problem is in your hardware, because iPhones, do, not, support, WebM on websites! They do support the files if you download them and play them in media player specifically. We have sampling system to bypass this issue, but in the end, it's still problem with your hardware, not the site.
e621:webm

sexygaydragon said:
I used to use PlayerXtreme but haven't needed it for awhile. I've been using unzip to view the videos that didn't work. Had to modify the file type as webm isn't one of the free options.

Considering it's the only site I've been having this issue with and I'm not the only one I think it's a safe bet it's an issue with the site. I don't know why I even bothered to bring it to attention. Clearly there's no interest in fixing anything.

Didn't read the previous reply, obviously. "Blame the uploader, we don't re-encode them" TL;DR

alphamule said:
Didn't read the previous reply, obviously. "Blame the uploader, we don't re-encode them" TL;DR

No I read it. I don't take anything Mairo says as fact ever cause it never is. If it works everywhere else it clearly isn't the uploader at fault.

I'm done replying to this. Waste of my time to even have made this topic post.

Every video linked in this thread works perfectly fine for me (Samsung Internet Browser)

All videos mentioned play fine for me, using Brave browser on an older iPhone.

kemonophonic said:
Every video linked in this thread works perfectly fine for me (Samsung Internet Browser)

jfrankparnell said:
All videos mentioned play fine for me, using Brave browser on an older iPhone.

They were fixed that's why

sexygaydragon said:
No I read it. I don't take anything Mairo says as fact ever cause it never is. If it works everywhere else it clearly isn't the uploader at fault.

I'm done replying to this. Waste of my time to even have made this topic post.

If Mairo says something as fact about video or image quality, then it's almost certainly is.
Perhaps, you should listen to him for once. Otherwise, you are going to have a bad time.

sexygaydragon said:
They were fixed that's why

...so it was the missing samples being problem and I did fix those :V

TBF, samples not generating is still site issue, I'll try to poke about those again if they still keep being issue.

I feel jaded, lately. I responded to arrogance, and I wasn't shocked to see even more. Even spoonfeeding the basic fact that those other sites mutilate their uploads and this is an archival site didn't get through. Sorry for rant, feeling bitter today. :(