post to youtube finishes on its own

the short version

post to youtube now hands your episode to underway's own render machine, and that machine uploads it. one press, whatever the length of the episode or the size of the file. close the tab, lock the phone, walk off: the upload carries on, and the next time you open the episode the link to the video is there.

and the thumbnail on youtube is now the cover your vault shows for that episode. the same file, not a second drawing of it.

what went wrong

on 3 october episode 25, a normal landscape episode about a patent attorney's quote range, failed on post to youtube. the button said youtube had not answered in time and asked for the page to be refreshed. nothing was on the channel. episodes 18 to 24 had gone up fine that same afternoon.

the logs told a plainer story than the message did. the press never reached the server. before a post, the page saves the words you typed in the youtube boxes, so what goes out is what you just read. that save waited on a sign-in refresh that failed on the network, and it waited for four and a half minutes, until the button's own clock ran out. youtube was never asked anything.

underneath that was a second problem waiting its turn. the upload itself ran inside a single web request: download the whole file, send it to youtube in one go, all before the request's clock ran out. a short episode fitted. a long sit-down, on a slow afternoon, would not have.

what happens now

• the save before a post has a fifteen second clock. if it cannot finish, the post goes ahead with the words already saved, and the save carries on behind it.
• the press only queues the episode. it answers in a second or two.
• a render machine downloads the file to its own disk and sends it to youtube in pieces. a piece that drops is asked about and resumed, never started again.
• the page checks the queue every few seconds and shows the link the moment the video is up. leave and come back, and it picks up where it was.
• a portrait episode that still needs its landscape version gets it made first, on the same machine, and the button says so.

never twice

the worst thing a post button can do is put the same episode on your channel twice. so there are three guards, and any one of them is enough. an episode that already has a youtube video recorded is never sent again; a second press just shows the link. there is one place in the queue per episode, and only one machine can hold it at a time. and youtube's upload address for that episode is kept before the first byte is sent, so a machine that stops halfway is replaced by one that carries on the same upload instead of starting a new video.

the thumbnail is your vault's cover

until now the youtube thumbnail was drawn a second time, in the shape of the video going up. for a portrait episode posted in landscape that meant a wide redraw of the cover, with your face cropped to fill the frame. it was not the picture in your vault, and it did not look like the rest of your series.

now underway takes the exact cover your vault shows and fits it into youtube's 1280 by 720 frame. a wide cover fills it. a portrait cover sits whole in the middle, with a soft blurred copy of itself filling the sides. nothing is stretched, nothing is cropped, and not a word on it changes.

every video already on a channel gets the new thumbnail on its own, a few at a time, without uploading anything again. if you change a cover later, set the thumbnail on the episode puts the new one on youtube.

videos you uploaded yourself

if you put an episode on youtube by hand, in youtube studio, underway did not know about it, so it never had a thumbnail from your vault. now, on that episode, paste the video id into the box beside set the thumbnail. the cover goes on that video and the episode is linked to it, so the episode shows view on youtube from then on. the id is the eleven characters after watch?v= in the video's address.

if youtube will not take it, the line under the button says why: the video is not on the channel you connected, the channel needs a verified phone number for custom thumbnails, or youtube refused for a reason it named.

on the phone

the same. post to youtube queues it and the phone watches until the link comes back, and the episode picks the upload up again when you reopen it. set the youtube thumbnail takes a pasted id there too.

faqs