"Just put it into Google Photos then."
I'm like ok wtv.
This is after trying to put it into OneDrive. Which had worked fine for me. Up until I asked her a couple of times to play the movie using a link I'd shared with her, KingsGlaive for FFXV's BD rip.. roughly 8-9 GBs.
She's like "It doesn't play the audio." So I'm like yeah that's normal since it is a BDrip and the bluray audio codec probably isn't compatible with the video player on your phone.
I asked her to use VLC instead which should work fine, and she should have anyway.. but she's like no. Just put it in Google Photos. No reason given as to why that should make a difference after she'd already downloaded the file.
But I'm like ok.
I figured that since I don't have room to put such a big file into my main two google photos account that I'd have to use the third one. That one was created a few years ago when I'd asked a friend from Xbox Live to set up an android phone but he didn't want to use his own account or didn't have one. I took over the account a short while after when it appeared that he didn't end up using it and my devices had started making automatic backups to it anyway.
I actually thought I had uploaded the BDrip to that account using google chrome.. but checked the next morning and noticed that the upload had failed.
Fine.
At some point later I tried again from Microsoft's Edge browser.. again for no particular reason.. and found that the upload not only went through, but it had gone up on one of my main google accounts.... that didn't have enough quota space for it.
Que?
So I looked into it. I mean I was under the assumption that I needed to use Microsoft's OneDrive because she'd be able to stream the movie, which she did, and that it would allow the upload of the movie without re-encoding it.
After years of testing all of these cloud storage services I was under the impression that Google Photos had a 2GB limited.. one that I'd run into many years ago when the service suggested using the desktop auto uploader and when I realized it would be impractical to do these uploads from a mobile device. Since at the time I really started testing them I was into terabytes of data. Moving that much data, down from the internet, to a desktop, to mobile and then back up again wasn't practical.
And there was the other limits. Not just the 2GB limit, but that google photos didn't want 4K video files.
I'm thinking that the limits much have been changed but looking back on it.. I can't see when as I've been trying to upload >2GB and >1080p videos for a while without success. At least until she asked me to and when I decided to use a different browser.
I guess I'm just the most shocked because Microsoft's Edge Browser actually did the upload without so much as a hiccup.
It does uploads to OneDrive that are 4K and larger than 2GB just fine.. but they are limited to >10GB. Or rather once uploaded the files showed as 2GB even though they are much bigger. Streaming them back is the problem.
Side note and quite irritatingly the service (all of them for now) do not allow playback of 4K video files when using Xbox One S (and PS4 pro).. Even though the consoles are marketed as compatible with 4K video, all I get is a green screen. As neither does 4K game streaming and both know when they are connected to a 4K screen I'm assuming I can't do proper testing until I get a 4K monitor. But playback to a phone works fine from OneDrive. Playback to a phone looks downgraded (also from Google) and that would be perfectly fine on consoles too.. but nope.
But back to topic I suppose it isn't that surprising that Edge did the job for both uploads to google photos.
So I tried something else just for clarity.
I tried uploading 12 4K video files to Google Photos.
I wasn't asked this time if I wanted to upload them using quota space or not. I don't have enough space for 12 4K files that's for sure. It just started the job anyway.
For the next 2 days it was uploading the files and dropping some of them.
I eventually figured out that the ones it dropped were >10GB. And that's fine. Now if it dropped them right off the bat, or if it tried uploading them and stopped at 10GBs might have contributed to the total time to run the job being 2 days.. but it could have just popped up a message beforehand mentioning the 10GB limit.
The 5 4K files that did get uploaded I'm assuming will have to be processed before they will appear in google photos. I'm interested to know if they will remain 4K resolution or not.
She watched the whole movie, but I don't know if she downloaded it again or not from Google. That's slightly annoying because I can't tell if she would have been able to stream it. She doesn't have type of connection quality.
But if and when the 4K files upload and get done processing.. they are free. I wouldn't even have known to try a different browser least of all Microsoft Edge. Unlike Baidu that has censorship issues and bandwidth that's too slow to manage 4K playback, and One Drive that's only useful for the task when you have an Office365 subscription to get 1TB free storage.. Google Photos doesn't seem to care about censorship (where Baidu scans and removes some pirated content) and can playback at least up to 1080p without much buffering. It'll be interesting to see the results with real, large, 4K video files.
But the results are weird. 3 show up as 1080p instead of 4K and playback at 1080p which is fine.. but the other two are 360p but the description of the file shows its proper 2160p resolution so they aren't great to watch on a big screen. And 4 of them show their proper file size, 1 shows something much smaller. And for whatever reason I had 12 jobs initially.. but while only 5 completed.. 2 are the same video. But once at 360p and once at 1080p. Kind of a waste trying to upload 12 movies to only get 4 after 2 days.