Video name errors and automatic conversion

What do you mean specifically by non-alphanumeric characters? WordPress sanitizes filenames on upload and generally removes any offending characters. Can you give me an example of a filename that doesn’t work? Also, the specific error log message?

Conversion should run in the background without keeping the encoding queue open. If you have any plugins running that interfere with wp-cron that’s usually the culprit. In general if for some reason wp-cron isn’t executing correctly then the encodes won’t start.

By non-alphanumeric characters I mean characters like apostrophes, asterixis, parentheses, square brackets, hyphens and colons.

We have tried disabling all other plugins except VETG but the automatic conversion still won’t run for both video and thumbnail generation – if we run the process manually from Media library it works fine. Ive also found that if I upload a non Mp4 file (mov,wmv,etc) the video conversion needs to happens first before the thumbnail generation or it doesn’t work.

I’ve now installed a plugin to manage all wp-cron events so I can see all events. If I schedule the following VETG jobs to reoccur hourly will this resolve and am I missing any task?

kgvid_cleanup_generated_logfiles
kgvid_cleanup_generated_thumbnails
kgvid_cleanup_queue

Appreciate your help Kyle ??

Are the characters in the title field of the video attachment or the filename? WordPress should remove any of the non-alphanumeric characters you mentioned—with the exception of hyphens—from filenames. And I find it hard to believe that hyphens are causing you trouble. I want to reproduce the bug, so can you give me an example of a filename/title that gives you an error? Also, the specific error log message you mentioned in your first post? How are you and your users uploading videos?

Unfortunately, scheduling those cron jobs to run hourly won’t do anything. All the encoding cron jobs are one-time only, and have arguments specific to the file that’s being encoded. Are you by any chance running SSL in wp-admin using a self-signed certificate? That’s a known problem with wp-cron. If that’s the case, adding this code to your functions.php file might help:

add_filter( 'https_local_ssl_verify', '__return_false' );

The plugin WP Control also does a good job of checking that wp-cron is running smoothly.

Automatic thumbnail generation relies on wp-cron, so some of your thumbnail problems could be related to that. But you could try disabling in-browser thumbnail creation in the FFMPEG settings tab of the plugin settings page which should help with generating thumbnails for non-HTML5-compliant video formats.

The non-alphanumeric characters don’t appear to be an issue now. You were right, the filenames are sanitised. I was looking at the video titles.
– Re. the automatic process we still can’t crack it. We are using the WP Control plugin & completed a good cleanup of jobs but thumbnail generation & video conversion still not automatic.
– If we do run manually, jobs are queued but for some the conversion still fails. Sometimes the 1080p works but 720p wont – some videos it’s the other way round. The message we get is Error: No log file.
– We aren’t running SSL in wp-admin and have also tried turning thumbnail FFMPEG tab on/off but doesn’t make a difference.

At my wits end – would you mind taking a look at it? Your plugin is excellent & an important tool for us so it’s only fair we pay for your time and help contribute towards the ongoing development. I have your addy details from your site but let me know if you would be ok with this first and then I’ll email you privately.

My suspicion is that I can’t fix your problem, since it sounds to me like something unusual in your server configuration, and I just don’t have the troubleshooting skills available to figure that out, but I can take a look at your WordPress admin and see if there’s anything I can do from there.