Why can't I upload my video?

Did you try to upload a .mp4 file and you got an error that looks a lot like this?

Image can't be blank
Image size can't be blank
Image width can't be blank
Image height can't be blank
Image mime type (video/mp4) is invalid
Image duration can't be blank
Image orig sha512 hash can't be blank

That's because Philomena only supports WebM video, and transcoding is extremely hardware-intensive to do on the server side.

So how do I upload videos, then?
If you have a .mp4 file, you can search online for many online conversion tools, such as Convertio or CloudConvert. The default settings should be good enough, but you will need to change the audio codec (see below).

If your file is too large to upload to an online conversion tool, Handbrake is a powerful encoding tool that's available on all platforms. (It's a frontend for ffmpeg, so if you're familiar with that software Handbrake should be fairly straightforward).

Please use the following settings when transcoding:
Video codec: vp9 (sometimes called libvpx-vp9)
Audio codec: vorbis (opus is the default, but not all browsers support it yet, so your video might not have sound!)

Please post below if you have any questions!