How Do I Upload My Media to My Account?
Before You Begin
In order to upload files to your account, you'll need to acquire an FTP client. FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol, is one of the methods for transferring data over the Internet. You'll use FTP to transfer your streaming media files from your computer to your server.
To FTP to your server you'll need to acquire an FTP client. There are a great many FTP programs available, some examples include:
Macintosh:
Windows 3.1, 9x, 2K, ME, NT, XP:
After you've downloaded the program follow all the instructions for installation.
Configuring Your FTP Client
The screenshots in this section are from CuteFTP but the principles apply to every FTP program.
To start your adventures in FTP you'll first have to open your FTP client. If you're using CuteFTP, you should be greeted with a window similar to the one below:
Click on the "Add Site" button and a new window will appear. It will look similar to this:
- In the "Site Label" field type in whatever you like. "My Streaming Account", or "(your domain name) Media Server", or "All Your FTP Are Belong To Us". If you administer several sites, it would probably be best to label this FTP connection something you can remember.
- In the "Host Address" field insert your IP# or domain name(media.yourname.com). The IP# to your MediaHostingWorks account can be found in the email you received from us when your account was set up.
- The "User ID" and "Password" fields are case sensitive, enter both as you gave them to us.
- You shouldn't have to fill in anything else so hit "Ok" and you'll be brought to this screen:
Hit the "Connect" button now and CuteFTP will establish a connection to your server and you'll see a screen like this one:
This window is divided into 3 sections. The top-most section displays all the commands that CuteFTP sends to the server. The right-most window displays what is on your media server. When you FTP into your server you will see some directories. You'll want to put your audio and video files into the "audio" and "video" directories respectively. Lastly the left-most window displays what is on your PC. To upload/download files just drag-and-drop between the left and right windows.
Common FTP Errors
Q:"I try and upload in ASCII and i get a corrupt file. Binary seems to work fine! What's going on?"
Q: "Sometimes I upload an HTML an it's corrupted at the end. Am I doing something wrong?"
Both of these problem occur because of basically the same problem. Some operating systems discern a difference between text and binary files. MS-DOS is one of them; text files in MS- DOS end each line with a carrige-return+linefeed. Windows-based machines have carried over this functionality, and as such ASCII files on these machines appear to be larger than the "same file" on a UNIX system.
What's actually occuring is your FTP client is trying to *resume* the ASCII upload. This is inappropriate for Windows-based machines; because ASCII files are different sizes on your machine than on the UNIX server, the FTP client is actually trying to resume from a point past the end of the file.
UNIX files can have gaps in them; these gaps are always NULL characters, and thus this behavior is not seen on downloads. But Windows machines can not have gaps. If you try and write to a file on a Windows machine at a point beyond the end of the file, the file will automatically grow; and inbetween will be seemingly random data.
The simplest workaround is to simply delete the file off of the server before uploading a new copy.
A more complete solution is to get another FTP client that knows that ASCII files cannot be safely resumed.
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