How to reliably upload large files through a web interface

Background: I have a site that deals with large video files (sports videos). The site allows users to upload any source file, but most of the videos come from DVDs. I am currently using a modified version of jumploader to encode and upload files to th开发者_开发知识库e webserver with an HTTP request. The jumploader is a java client, and looking at my webstats, only about 75% of my users have java installed.

What I want: I have looked for a flash based uploader that transfers a byte stream to a server. Byte streams would be ideal so I can capture partial videos for failed uploads. I have also looked for flash-based ftp clients, but I haven't found anything promising. There are some flash-based uploaders that post via HTTP, and I'm considering this. I do not want to use a simple file post. Some upload methods also put the full file into memory first, and this obviously is not an option for me.

Does anyone have experience uploading large (up to 2-3GB) files to a web (or ftp) server from a web frontend (PHP) with any reliability?

as a flash based solution you can use swfupload, which is widely used because you can display a progress bar. It sends answers back to you which you can read with JavaScript.

We decided upon using Transloadit, a service which is specialised in uploading and encoding video files. You can even track whether a download was aborted by closing the browser window, it has realtime encoding and supports multiple formats. Moreover your files are stored at Amazon S3 so you can easily stream them with AWS CloudFront and JWPlayer or Flowplayer.

See also zencoder.

Cheers