The screenshot above shows a “failed” video upload from Chrome to YouTube that was actually successful blocking 3 other pending uploads. I’ve actually never used the mass/multi-video upload capability of YouTube in the last 2 years and had it work for me seamlessly.
Before the new Flash-based uploader, the older semi-Web-2.0 mass-upload form had incredible resize issues with the div’s on the page and wouldn’t correctly upload from FireFox. In Internet Explorer it would upload correctly BUT ignore all the Title/Description/Tag fields I typed in until after they were uploaded then I had to go manually edit them one at a time.
6 of 1 and a half-dozen of the other…
Today, using Chrome, I noticed that YouTube has a new, seemingly nicer upload behavior of selecting multiple videos with a multi-file-select dialog and then enumerating them all right on the page for you as they upload in the background. Unfortunately for me (and anyone else using it), as soon as the first upload is done, it incorrectly reports “Error” and then stops — leaving you NO WAY to continue the upload or move onto the other movie.
Given that I was originally uploading about 12 movies for Dragon Age gameplay, totaling somewhere around 2 GB, I didn’t want to baby-sit this thing and just wanted it to run overnight.
After it hung, I remembered the persistent nature of the older mass-video uploader for YouTube, that would actually remember the complete list of videos you were uploading even after uploading them and still show them to you on the upload page — again, buggy as shit. Hoping for this behavior (one bug to combat another), I hit refresh and saw the entire page clear out… 30 mins of title, description and tag editing throw out to the wolves… a few loud curses later I decided to try again.
This time I selected 4 videos and gave it a whirl — sure enough, everything locked up after the first video “Errored” out, but as you can see from the screenshot — it’s actually uploading just fine, but I cannot continue the upload.
So now I’m starting a 3rd batch upload from Internet Explorer 8 this time… if this works, I’m going to scream profanities at the Google.com homepage until someone there hears me and decides to debug the upload flows on YouTube more thoroughly.
Update #1: IE failed in exactly the same way — YouTube you are driving me f-ing crazy:
