Buyers having trouble with downloads

[wildcatfan]

After years of seamless operations with downloads I've gotten two complaints in the last two days. In both cases buyers were using mobile devices and were unable to open the files. The first one did not give me details about her devices, though she said she used three different ones; the second one said:



I am not able to download this file to either my laptop (a mac) or iphone. My download file says the reason is that 'I do not have permission to access this file'. My phone says it cannot work with Safari. The site did not mention this as a problem (having Safari that is) so am I doing something wrong?



Any advice?

[wildcatfan]

An addendum to the above - the files both parties were having trouble with were zipped files. I read elsewhere on the site that some users have trouble with zipped files, so I modified the products to get rid of the need for zipping the files and have asked the purchasers to try again.



Further addendum: this fixed the problem for one of them, the one who reported the error message about not having permission to access the file.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Direct downloading to mobile devices is a bit of a mixed bag depending on what OS and software they're using on that device -- see further discussion here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/6281



I suspect your second buyer with the permission error simply used up all her download Attempts on the iPhone which did not not accept .zip files for download (see link above), so by the time she tried again with her Mac laptop, the link was simply expired already.

[wildcatfan]

Just for the record, my second user with the permission error had not used up her download attempts. Thanks for getting back to me about this.

[spradlinbodyworks]

I just got the following email from someone who bought my products. The videos are remotely hosted. I have had one other person successfully download and play them. Any thoughts? Thanks so much!



"Hi Isabel my name is Adam i purchased your videos yesterday and have not been able to play any of them. I have tried using quicktime and other applications on multiple computers yet all i get is distorted audio file playing. Are there any other applications you can use to play these files?"

[E-junkie_Ninja]

In your E-junkie account go to Seller Admin>View/Download Transaction Log. Once the log opens find Adam's order and click on the linked Transaction ID. That will take you to the thank you page for his order. On that page, use the download links we provided to him and test the files once downloaded. After that let him know which program you used. If he used the same program, then the most likely problem is going to be on his computer.



If the download link has expired then you can go to Seller Admin>Re-Activate Expired Links to re-activate the link and allow you to run the above test.

[spradlinbodyworks]

Thank you for your response. I tried what you suggested and got the following error code: There is no default application specified to open the document 6156b09e.mp4_expires=1504803262_awsaccesskeyid+akiajajz4wcfn2dr4rgq_signature=b033p9kaynbv4pt4a6jzuy.



I checked with my video host, where the videos live, and the downloads directly from there are working just fine.



Thanks so much for your help.

[E-junkie_Guru]

If that error appeared when you started the download, that could be because you clicked Open rather than Save. Buyers must Save the full download to their computer before they can then Open the complete file in their media player.



If the error appeared after downloading when you attempted to open the finished download file, the problem may be with your Remote Product File URL. Our system takes everything after the last "/" in the URL to be the filename for the download, so your computer may not understand how to open a file named "6156b09e.mp4_expires=1504803262_awsaccesskeyid+akiajajz4wcfn2dr4rgq_si gnature=b033p9kaynbv4pt4a6jzuy", rather than just "6156b09e.mp4". It also appears that file URL will eventually expire, so you'd probably need to edit the product's settings periodically to update those URLs after they expire, which could become a hassle.



Using a third-party video hosting service which is merely storing your video files on Amazon S3 and serving them to us from there is probably overkill for our purposes and likely contributing to the filename complications above. You don't really need any specialized "video hosting" service to store video files for us to deliver to your buyers, so any generic file hosting server would suffice. The fact that file happens to contain video content is irrelevant to our system, and we never expose the full, original remote file URL to your buyers.



It would be simpler and probably also cheaper to cut out that video hosting middleman and just store your .mp4 video files directly on Amazon S3 yourself. Just set your files to be Public and obtain the public link URL for each file -- note that "public" does not mean your files would be listed or exposed anywhere for the general public to discover; it just means anyone who already knows the exact URL for the file can access it at that URL without any further restrictions, similar to having an unlisted phone number. The unique download links we issue to each buyer will cloak your remote file URLs and enforce your link expiration settings.