150 or so it is!

as far as the movies, they have always been up, mainly only to registered users as a hook I guess to get people to register. I think in a year I have hit 6% of my monthly limit for bandwidth and that was when I uploaded all of them.

If I linked them it would be as movies/moviename.dhe whatever vs. the http: route. I am assuming if I do it that way they embed and auto play? I am not to keen on auto play but I am trying to understand the media player in this I guess, I had assumed it was for MP3's. Would I have to add the media extensions to the list?

anyway to make it so when they add a link it also makes a thread in a selected forum, wit hthe title and the link in it, ect?

I found this all a bit complicated !! It works as follows:

- Assuming the filetype is registered in the vb/attachments table, then - when the use clicks on the link - LDM sends the headers that are defined in that table, then dumps the contents of the file. Normally, that will produce an Open/Save As dialog at the user's end - but depending on the software that has been installed, it may fire up an application. Adobe Acrobat is the worst culprit in this regard.

- If the filetype is not registered in the vb/attachments table, behaviour depends on the browser and software loaded on the user's computer. It may or may not offer an open/save dialog or simply fire up an application.

So in general it's a good idea to register the file types in vb/attachments so that there's more control.

- For the embedded player, this only works for registered filetypes. It behaves the same way as a normal 'click' except that the material is diverted to an embedded Windows Media Player. This will work for videos, except - as far as I understand - WMP will wait until the complete file is downloaded before it starts playing. I have not looked into what happens with Real Media .rm files, etc, which I think tell the player to start work immediately.

Hope this helps.

Not for links, but when you create a category, there's an option to 'autocreate' a subforum in the category's parent forum, so this gives the user a 'one-click' way of finding all the associated entries.

One difficulty with this is that VB does not seem to have a way to track 'when last updated' for these pseudo-forums that are in fact links somewhere else, so the user does not get to see when something new appeared. This may just be a matter of writing a timestamp into the forum description table, but I haven't tested this.

Sorry for the confusion, I will give it a shot and post the results back here. thanks again for your help

Thanks for the update! Very cool to have the file uploads.

My forum is in a subdomain. I am trying to input an upload directory off my forum url. I have chmoded it to 777 to test and it won't take my directory in the upload_directory setting.

If my local_file_root_prefix is /var/www/forums I should be able to enter "videos" into the upload_dir if the directory is /var/www/forums/videos ??? For some reason anything I enter into this field is not accepted.

Thank You for the help!

Sean

I tried this with a test site which sits in http://ipaddress/local_site/forums etc. The directory holding http://ipaddress/local_site is /data/www/sites/local_site and I want to store uploads in subdirectories of /uploads which sits in the local_site directory. So I set *local_file_root* to 1, *local_file_root_prefix* to /data/www/sites/local_site and *upload_dir* to /uploads, and it all works correctly for me.

I pull from my server a few directories back, ../../blah/blah/file.type so I would figure it would be nice and fast and I thought it was before the upgrade. Is it still true that if we link to another domain's files it will pull from their server, through us (thus we're downloading and re-uploading the file)?

Sounds good to me :)


Is it your intention to never seperate this from the vB attachments area? What if we don't want to allow the attachments in threads of certain files, only in our Links/Downloads manager?

Thanks for the help :)

Matt

I don't know what to say. I've just tested our primary server, which we access via ADSL - a 1.6Mb word file came down from LDM at 160 kbytes/sec, which is close to the limit that we can achieve from the ADSL service to which we subscribe. (I have a test script on that server to test theoretical speed of line + server - it reported 126 kbytes/sec, but I imagine that LDM achieved some compression with the word file).

That's got to be true unless you set force_download to expose the link so that the user's browser can get straight to the host domain.

I'll never say never, but I do prefer not to rewrite code that's already written and properly supported by the VB people.

*Edited* - by the way, I think you can disable filetypes in the VB admincp as far as having them as allowed attachments. LDM will still pick them up as acceptable.

Very strange that I'm not getting good speeds. The server only hosts my small site and its a dual xeon 2.8ghz with 1gb ram and 2x120gb drives. If you had any suggestions for what to check, I'd certainly appreciate it, otherwise I'll just see what I can do with testing different methods.

Thanks again, Andrew :)

Matt