support thread for digital download of existing DVDs

This thread is to help folks get their digital download of the 4-DVD set as part of their support of the 2015 rocket mass heater kickstarter.

The actual product is currently available at http://woodburningstoves2.com

Hi Paul

Got my email with the first round of candy and all of that has downloaded safely and can watch the two videos on youtube. Have been waiting for the email about the download of the old dvd's that where part of the 60 dollar 8 download reward package and don't seam to have received it yet. Have checked spam and trash folders and know sign there.

Was messaging Cassie last week and she very helpfully checked that you had got my correct email address from kickstater. Only thing I can think of is that Cassie may have addded me two the later 72 hour download? If so thats fine. I have got enough candy from the first email to keep me going for a while.

This has got to be one of the most generous give away of rewards on kickstarter particularly at the lower levels. Well done Paul and team.

Last night we got the digital download of the 4-DVD set "Wood Burning Stoves 2.0" lined up for more than a hundred people. And we got the digital download of the 3-DVD set "World Domination Gardening" lined up for over a hundred people.

It sounds like you should have been in the first batch. I have now verified that you are supposed to get the stuff for the first batch.

I do know that I got an email from Ian at scubbly saying that people were downloading the huge files. So at least a few people got those.

I looked up your email address and .... it was not in the list of emails that cassie sent me. So I am now concerned that we might have sent a big gob of candy to the wrong people. I have an email to cassie about it.

Hi folks,
The mailout for Paul's latest kickstarter goodies went out in two batches, late last night and then another batch very early this morning.
Already several people have reported not getting theirs. I suspect they've been spam-blocked. Or *maybe* the email address was wrong.

Either way, if you expected goodies but didn't get them, please say so here so Paul can verify you were on the list, and then email me privately so I can re-send your email if it was blocked.

contact me: admin -at- scubbly -dot- com

Paul, thanks for hosting this thread so there's a convenient communication channel to sort things out.

Cheers
Ian Ring
Administrator
Scubbly.com

At this point, I think there might be a lot of people that are not getting their emails because .... we dropped the ball and use the wrong email addresses. I am trying to contact cassie to sort it all out.

I have not received an email, yet for any of the downloads. I have been checking my junk folder, though I may have missed it on Friday. I get emails from kickstarter and from permies, so my address is correct.

I didn't get the email for the digital downloads for the old RMH videos, I m not so worried about that, I have them on DVD.

Was world domination gardening videos part of the candy at the 60$ level? If so I really do want to get that download...
If not and I'm just misreading or wishful thinking- ignore this...

Hi!

So, last eve (Sat, 4/4) around 10:20 PM EST, I got an email from notifications(at)scubbly(dot)com.

With subject: your early version of the older rocket mass heater DVDs

But the email body is blank. No link. Nothing.

I did go to scubbly and tried "retrieve download token".
I promptly got an email that summarized all the scubbly purchases I've done on my own in the past, but no item called "early version of the older rocket mass heater DVDs" or suchlike.

Not sure what I should do at this point to get the early RMH downloads, if anything.

Thanks!
Mariamne

Edit to add this P.S.: FYI--I'm not in the "spam-blocked" camp, nor in the "wrong email" camp.

Eva Taylor wrote:
Was world domination gardening videos part of the candy at the 60$ level?

Nope. You can get it at http://richsoil.com/wdg

Thanks Paul!

hello folks,

Two different issues have been reported:

1) Didn't get it
It appears that the recipient list wasn't accurate. Paul's working on resolving that, and we'll do another mailout when that's all figured out.

2) Got it, but the email body is blank
This is a peculiar one and has been happening mostly to people with an AOL or Yahoo address, but it's happened to some others too.

For *both* problems, please send me an email to (admin -at- scubbly -dot- com) and we'll make sure that you get the goodies, eventually!
The emails will help me keep track of who has been looked after. I'll also refer to this forum thread.

Cheers
Ian Ring
Administrator
Scubbly.com

I was writing my email when my inbox received the email with the links. Seems like the updated list is working.
A big great thanks to all of you.

On a side note, the link on the scubbly page for a download agent for chrome fails for me.

omro ooompf wrote:I was writing my email when my inbox received the email with the links. Seems like the updated list is working.
A big great thanks to all of you.

On a side note, the link on the scubbly page for a download agent for chrome fails for me.

Ian told me earlier that we are currently loving the server to death. He is looking at server upgrades.

paul wheaton wrote:
Ian told me earlier that we are currently loving the server to death. He is looking at server upgrades.

The email says the links are valid 30 days. I rushed because of the 72 hrs notice, if we have indeed 30 days, I can wait to download them.

Paul is right - there are so many people downloading the videos all at once, the download service is maxing out at 100% capacity.
So if you are downloading right now, it's going to be verrrrry slow. I *strongly* suggest you use a "resumable download" agent, or else you could end up with incomplete, and/or corrupted copies of the files, and then you'll have to start all over again.
Or... if you can tolerate the delayed gratification... wait until tomorrow!
Cheers, Ian

Ian Ring wrote:Paul is right - there are so many people downloading the videos all at once, the download service is maxing out at 100% capacity.
So if you are downloading right now, it's going to be verrrrry slow. I *strongly* suggest you use a "resumable download" agent, or else you could end up with incomplete, and/or corrupted copies of the files, and then you'll have to start all over again.
Or... if you can tolerate the delayed gratification... wait until tomorrow!
Cheers, Ian

Yep.... ended up with 4 vids about half of their supposed size. I'm using a Chromebbook and apparently the download manager doesn't resume properly as it said downloads were complete, but in reality were not. I'll give it a break and try again another time. Thanks all!

hey you downloaders!

As mentioned above, there are so many people downloading the videos right now that the service keeps crashing. Scubbly is built to handle lots of concurrent downloads, but evidently we've discovered its upper limit. Scubbly needs a hardware upgrade, which unfortunately can not be done at this time.

If you find that your download is interrupted, or it ends abruptly and the file is incomplete, please don't restart it again right away! Wait until tomorrow, or even later in the week. Scubbly needs to get through this initial tsunami of downloads and then we'll be able to address scaling up to handle traffic of this magnitude.

Thanks,
Ian Ring
Administrator
Scubbly.com

Received my email from scubbly for the DVD download about 6 hours ago. As I have the DVDs already, I will wait until later this week before I download to give the servers a chance. I have all the rest of my candy, so I am happy as a pig in - uncomposted fertilizer - yeah, that's the ticket, uncomposted fertilizer!

Hi folks!

After a day of frustration, finally some good news! Though it at first seemed like it would be unfeasible, we did some emergency hardware upgrades and DOUBLED the capacity and speed of the download service.
Since the upgrade, service is much more stable, and is currently handling the load of all your downloads pretty well. Scubbly is still responding slower than normal, but at least it's not crashing every few minutes. Hurray!

If you were downloading the videos in the past couple of hours, you will definitely have experienced service interruptions. And if you weren't using a resumable download agent, then you very likely have some incomplete files.

How can you tell if the video file is incomplete? If the file won't open, or if you can't watch it to the end, or if you can't skip forward or back - those are all symptoms. But to be absolutely sure, you should check the file size. On the download page (the page with the Download buttons), each file states its exact size in bytes. If your files don't match, then it's incomplete and you need to grab a new copy.

For reference, here are the four video files and their exact size:

The 4-DVD Set:
sneaky-heat-640x360.mp4 853183832 bytes
fire-science-640x360.mp4 632085303 bytes
boom-squish-640x360.mp4 621826566 bytes
hot-rocket-640x360.mp4 601482981 bytes

The 3-DVD set:
hugelkultur-micro-doc-640x360.mp4 104700118 bytes
hugelkultur-640x360.mp4 911615407 bytes
Pond-640x360.mp4 863456542 bytes
swale-640x360.mp4 840230036 bytes

Cheers
Ian Ring
Administrator
Scubbly.com

First download done Took a few tries, but well worth the wait!

paul wheaton wrote:At this point, I think there might be a lot of people that are not getting their emails because .... we dropped the ball and use the wrong email addresses. I am trying to contact cassie to sort it all out.

Oops! I just double-checked my backing level and I'm at $50 not $60 so I'm below the DVDS threshold and shouldn't be waiting on the second email. Really sorry to have added to the confusion. The candy I have had is great and very much appreciated, it's just made me even more eager to see the 'main event' DVDs.

Thank you for the email for the DVD and everything looks perfect.

Hmm... Like I predicted in the thread about candy we've exceeded the capabilities of the hosting platform

I'm trying to download World Domination Gardenng and I see error:

I cannot connect to the database because: Too many connections

or sometimes I see the page that asks me for the token or paypal transaction id

Thankfully we have 30 days to download this stuff.

Wow Ian, and everyone!
Great work on everything! And on a holiday weekend no less! I don't belong to any other forums, this is it and it's because of all this effort that goes into making thinks like this happen- you guys made me feel like my shit mattered ( heh heh compost reference?) just wanted to throw it back attcha ...

I am guessing that the server is facing capacity issues again, I got this message when I clicked on the scubbly link:

I cannot connect to the database because:

This wouldn't be an issue if every home was wired with Fiber Optic Internet, downloads would be done in seconds, but since we live in country that is run by corporations we get stuck with paying for "upgrades" that were supposed to have happened a decade or more ago and we are continually lied to. Cable Companies could have converted their HFC systems to all Fiber by now.

Rant over.


I will wait a few days and see if its better then.

For those of you who experienced "cannot connect because..." errors, those are gone now. It's not a nice looking error page, but it's essentially saying "too many connections" - so try again later!

For those of you interested in such things...
Scubbly is still delivering downloads at its new twice-as-big capacity, averaging 7.25Mbps. Even at that speed, those videos are pretty big and downloading all four of the them would take over 6 minutes, if it was just one person connected. Presently... there are 49. So take those numbers and do some multiplying
I've attached a graph of what the traffic look like to me, so you can appreciate what WORLD DOMINATION looks like from a technical perspective. Scubbly serves many hundreds of downloads per day, and most of them don't even show up as a blip on that graph. The little spikes you can see earlier in the week - those are big video downloads that took many minutes. Then... kaboom! Paul's kickstarter mailout on Saturday night maxed out the service at 3.5 Mbps. Then I did the hardware upgrade last night, and we're currently hitting the new max at 7.2 Mbps.

Cheers
Ian

Great work and thanks for fixing the download issues.

Out of curiosity, why are the resolutions fixed so low at 640 x 360? I compared the 640 x 360 Fire Science video with the 720p Youtube version released the other day with the candy, and you can see a noticeable difference in the quality. Is there any chance that we will be able to get 720p versions of the future videos? Either in scrubbly or as link to a private youtube video?

We used a higher res for the digital download to start with, but too many people had problems downloading such big files. Plus, a lot of people wanted to keep the videos on their phones or tabs for later viewing, and memory was limited. For lots and lots of reasons, we decided to go with the smaller format for digital download.

Currently, we offer HD streaming on vimeo. But there are a lot of things I don't like about that.

When putting together the kickstarter it was a gut wrenching thing to figure out what to offer. As is, there are clearly too many options, and there are some things that people just don't want.

Then comes the thing where you might put together an option which ends up being a lot of work and expense, only to have just three people buy it.

And then there are some really excellent permaculture videos out there and they are something like $60 for one DVD - and DVD is the only format. So I feel pretty good that we offer three formats for a really good price.

When I click my link I am brought to the token/paypal page and there is no response when I click "verify token." Are you swamped again or is this a different problem? Also any suggestions for a good Chrome download manager. I used to have a good one but must have deleted it for some reason.

I have started my downloads! At first it gave me a ticket number request. Closed window and clicked on email link again. Got a "Cannot connect to server because:" message. Closed window and clicked on link again. 3rd time is the charm and with the 3rd click of the email link, I came to the download page!

Thank you for all the effort!

Hey all,
The download system is still running at 100% of its newly-doubled capacity. It hasn't crashed in quite a while, but it is occasionally returning that "couldn't connect..." error. All the symptoms being described so far are indicative of the same problem.

If you can tolerate the delayed gratification, you'll have much better download speeds if you wait a day (or two) until the tsunami of downloads has finished.
Thanks for your patience. Lots of lessons are being learned about managing the machinery under extreme loads, so we'll be more prepared for the next time this happens.
Cheers, Ian

I have now successfully downloaded the DVDs. I found DownThemAll for Firefox to work much better than Chrome or the Chrono download manager. Thanks to all who put in such hard work!

This would be a good time to point out that folks have 30 days to get this.

Ian, I think we should change the algorithm to be something where one email is sent every ten minutes or so. That would make it so that 144 per day could be sent out, but it would pace the servers. I think it would be better to spread the candy out over several days but have flawless downloads.

Paul W. asked me to repost my question here. So here you go Paul.

I have since figured out that the download was incomplete and because we have all inundated Scubblys' servers to the point of failure, I will attempt to try again in a few days.

"I have downloaded all the candy and almost everything that has been made available to me. ($150 donation lvl)

I am watching the second download from "World Domination Gardening 3-DVD set" titled 'hugelkultur'. I use BS player and it shows me a movie length of 02:22:02 but at 01:24:45 the video stops. and it just sits there with the timer ticking away towards the end of the 2hr 22 min with nothing. It's as if the last half of the video file was recorded as a picture.

How long is the hugelkultur video supposed to be?

It took soo long to download that I'd rather not just sit here trying to re-download it over and over without knowing if that may help first.

Thank you for all you do. "

Hia Ian,

I fall under the 'Tuesday' candy group.

Please advise on the following -
1) I received 2 e-mails from Scubbly on Sunday (1 x Older Rocket DVD's & 1 x World Domination DVD's), both in my junk folder. Were they meant to be sent out on Sunday given that I'm part of the Tuesday group?
2) The files seemed to download fine, but I noticed their file sizes do not correspond with what is listed on Scubbly (much smaller). To be safe I'm downloading them again, but I notice the file sizes differ every time I download yet it shows the download completed successfully (and is still much smaller than the sizes indicated). How do I fix this?
3) When opening the MP4's, it plays fine. When I try to forward (to see if it's complete), it bombs out. Tried using 3 different players and 2 different laptops with the same results. Anyone else have this problem?
4) When can we expect the e-mail on the rest of the Tuesday candy?

Cheers,

Ed.

Edward Gaybba wrote:Hia Ian,

I fall under the 'Tuesday' candy group.

Please advise on the following -
1) I received 2 e-mails from Scubbly on Sunday (1 x Older Rocket DVD's & 1 x World Domination DVD's), both in my junk folder. Were they meant to be sent out on Sunday given that I'm part of the Tuesday group?

I am not Ian, but I do know that Ian isn't going to know what "tuesday candy group" means.

The "tuesday candy group" are the people that could not get their candy in the first 72 hour window. So we set up a second 72 hour window for them.

But the stuff that Ian is working with has to do with a 30 day window and we have to send those emails out separately from the others. So we don't differentiate.

2) The files seemed to download fine, but I noticed their file sizes do not correspond with what is listed on Scubbly (much smaller). To be safe I'm downloading them again, but I notice the file sizes differ every time I download yet it shows the download completed successfully (and is still much smaller than the sizes indicated). How do I fix this?
3) When opening the MP4's, it plays fine. When I try to forward (to see if it's complete), it bombs out. Tried using 3 different players and 2 different laptops with the same results. Anyone else have this problem?

I gotta leave these for Ian. My guess is that you need a download manager.

4) When can we expect the e-mail on the rest of the Tuesday candy?

Sometime on Tuesday - today.

I tried to hold out, but I only lasted 'til Tuesday! Just finished downloading and checking all four of the videos, lie is aweosme as everything is complete and works just peachy! Now I am happy as two pigs in - uncomposted manure - this is like three levels up from uncomposted fertilizer!

Ian and the folks at Scubbly did an awesome job as did Paul, Cassie and the crew to get all this going awesome. Now to PATIENTLY wait for the new video to be edited and released. Oh, so very, very patiently - and as two pigs in a pile of uncomposted manure, it will be warm and squishy wait.

Hi Edward,

Lots of people were getting incomplete downloads over the weekend, right up until early Monday morning.
The best advice I have - and I give this to everyone! - is to use a "resumable" download manager. Use it *every* time you try to download something huge from the internet.

I have explained how & why it works, in this blog post:
http://www.scubbly.com/blog/2012/12/16/download-problems-and-how-to-solve-them/

The "TL; DR" version is this:
A normal HTTP download starts at the beginning of the file, reads toward the end, then finishes. It's all done in one open connection. If that connection is disrupted, for example by the download service crashing (*cough cough), then you'll end up with an incomplete file. (that was happening to a LOT of people on Sunday)
A "resumable" download agent does it differently - it will grab little pieces of the file at a time, as discrete small chunks from the beginning, the end, and middle. If any one of the chunks fails to download, it'll try again. You can stop the download, pause it, restart it, and keep going at any time whenever you're connected to the internet. An interrupted internet connection or a crashed server makes no difference - the download will continue grabbing chunks when it can. When all the chunks are received, the tool stitches them back together in the proper order, and it's done.

Today, the download service is humming happily with capacity to spare. So if you had troubles with the download in the past few days, you should try again today.

P.S. the symptoms you see with not being able to skip through a video to the end is totally because it's incomplete. The file sizes *should* match exactly what you see on the download page, right down to the byte.

I too have not received any email about the downloads. However after reading this I will wait a few and see if they show up
Thanks for the candy so far!