How VideoPress Bit Me

Recently, I’ve been uploading video files to VideoPress.com. When uploading the files, I’ve generally kept the default naming scheme provided by the Flip Camera. On my machine, there were two different video files with a similar name but different extensions, video-4.mp4 and video-4.mov. The .mov file was the interview with Jane Wells while the .MP4 file was the interview with Brad Williams. I discovered today that the reason why the Jane Wells interview started showing Brad Williams was because of the way VideoPress renames files.

When videos are uploaded to VideoPress, the service renames the file using the original name. So what ended up happening is that Video-4.MP4 and Video-4.mov both turned into video-4_fmt1.ogv. Since Brad’s video was uploaded first, the second uploaded file pointed to Brad’s video. This is what caused the confusion and why Jane’s interview switched from her, to Brad. What I ended up doing was downloading the Jane Wells interview .mov file, renaming the file and then re uploading it to VideoPress to resolve the conflict. This is a lesson that before you upload your videos to VideoPress, you should give them a unique file name.