We publish an online flip book flash based Magazine and it is only available to members of our forum. It would be useful if we could embed something like this as well.

Perhaps it is already possible, if so I’ve missed it.

Mike is yours for software downloads etc?

Well what is the intention of the link? Is it to allow people to download a file? If so then I know I wouldn’t want to do it. Just think of the bandwidth it would use up every time someone clicked on it not to mention the strain on your server resources. Your hosting company may get a little angry as well.

Conrad_Farlow said

We publish an online flip book flash based Magazine and it is only available to members of our forum. It would be useful if we could embed something like this as well.

Perhaps it is already possible, if so I’ve missed it.

Mike is yours for software downloads etc?

A few MB should be no problem at all. Just remember that everyone who reads the post can potentially download the attachment. The files I deal with are uncompressed audio files and video files.

Yellow Swordfish said

Well what is the intention of the link? Is it to allow people to download a file? If so then I know I wouldn’t want to do it. Just think of the bandwidth it would use up every time someone clicked on it not to mention the strain on your server resources. Your hosting company may get a little angry as well.

It is for people to download, but these are private forums and only a few people will be able to read the posts and access the downloads. Aside from that, my host account has unlimited bandwidth and I’ve already talked to them about whether they consider this an abuse of the account. They said as long as hundreds of people are not downloading the files it’s okay. The file sizes typically range from 30MB to 300MB.

And just to make sure I’m understanding you correctly: people have to actually click on the attachment to download it, right? It doesn’t start just by reading the post?

I’ve been doing this for a year or so but using a program called FileThingy to do the http uploads. I did have some success with attachments to smf posts, but it wasn’t completely reliable when the files get above about 50MB.

Having them attached to the actual posts is cleaner as long as it’s reliable and doesn’t have other side effects.

This is getting into territory that I am not too well up on but I thought that if you give a normal http link to an audio or video file then when that is clicked (and yes it would have to be clicked on) isn’t WordPress going to try and actually load it for playing? Is that not right? I thought that would happen for any filetype understood by your browser? So – if you have an MP4 browser support – and they all do – wont clicking on a standard link to an MP4 file just load the player?

I was under the impression that to force such a file to download instead of play required some special headers to be sent with the http request. At least – that is what I had to set up when I wrote the download manager plugin we use here on the SP site.

But – I am keen to be educated on the matter!

Yes, but right-click should still allow the files to be downloaded.

Edit: I understand it’s Cmd+Click on a 1 button Mac.

post-Leopard Macs two fingers on the trackpad and a single click 🙂

Doesn’t expecting users to right click on a link leave it open to them normal clicking and then loading a 300MB video which will try and play? I would have thought using a download plugin would have been much better. Enables you to save you files using ftp for example and simply linking to the download url.

And please don’t mention New Zealand! It is my favourite country and as it is winter here in the UK just about the one place I would love to be at the moment 🙂

Certainly, a download plugin would be nice, but I’m not aware of anything that integrates with SP (or SMF, for that matter).

As I said, these are for a low number of people to access and if they forget and left-click (as I occasionally do), they just need to hit the back button and start again. It’s not perfect, but I don’t know of another solution. I’ve had problems with zip files made in Windows being unable to be opend on a Mac in the past so this was the best compromise I could come up with.

BTW, did I mention I’m visiting New Zealand next week?

I was born and raised in NZ but have been living in Australia since 1983.

Just testing the upload system and it failed after uploading the complete file.

Well no – a decent Download Manager does not integrate as such. But it does provide a url to be used that will provide the correct header to force a download action. Was just a thought.

Well – Australia is quite nice but I had arguments with some of the wildlife! I lived in New Zealand for a year (working) and I just adored the place. We would probably have stayed but sadly it played havoc with my wife’s asthma (nobody seems to know why NZ has such an asthma problem) but worse, if she was bitten by a sandfly the bite would swell up to the size of a saucer and take a week or so to go down. As usual I didn’t even notice the when they bit me but she was not happy about this 🙂

Yellow Swordfish said

Well no – a decent Download Manager does not integrate as such. But it does provide a url to be used that will provide the correct header to force a download action. Was just a thought.

Well – Australia is quite nice but I had arguments with some of the wildlife! I lived in New Zealand for a year (working) and I just adored the place. We would probably have stayed but sadly it played havoc with my wife’s asthma (nobody seems to know why NZ has such an asthma problem) but worse, if she was bitten by a sandfly the bite would swell up to the size of a saucer and take a week or so to go down. As usual I didn’t even notice the when they bit me but she was not happy about this 🙂

I’ll be sure to send you a link to my nature photo gallery when I get it up. I also had asthma problems in NZ that are much better here in Cairns.

I can’t seem to get any file larger than about 1M to work on my site. On my localhost test installation I can get to 7MB, but it fails above that.

there are various settings in the php.ini that control uploads (1MB is the default)…  I would give them a look…

I don’t have access to php.ini on my host, but I currently use FileThingy (written in php) to upload files, and the largest one I’ve done was 800MB so I don’t expect that’s it. I seem to remember that I had to ask my host to change it.