For anyone who has been using Vidiscript for your tube software, I feel your pain. I spent quite a bit of time working with the code, and dealing with the missing features. After asking for help with many problems over the years, I recently found that Ian has sold the script, along with everyone’s email addys. I decided it was well past time to move on when I found even more major limitations relating to some “phone home checking” encrypted licensing issue. After doing tons of research, I have found the fastest, most cost effective way to export my vidiscript data and upgrade to a better tube script, importing all the necessary data.
Today I have completed a test, and it has worked. My busiest tube site has been upgraded, and it took very little time thanks to the very detailed help that J offered in a simple email. He took a copy of my old vidiscipt database and dumped the necessary information into a file.
If you need to upgrade your tube script from vidiscript, here is my suggestion for the fastest and most cost effective method for exporting your data and importing all of your videos, and video information. I was able to pull over all my tags, video descriptions and categories. I did not bother exporting the users – I figured saving all the videos was enough. I know they will have no problem signing up again.
Email J and explain that you will buy his awesome, affordable script if he will create this export / import file from your old database. Get to your phpadmin and click on your database, click the export tab, near the bottom check off save file as. Hit go and download the database to your local computer. Find the database that was exported, and zip it up. For my system it’s a right click – add to filename.zip – your system may vary.
Buy the new tube script. You can find it here – it’s under $100.
When you enter in your name and site info, etc. purchase the script – it may take 12 hours or so before you get an email that actually gives you a link to finalize the purchase and make the actual payment.
As soon as I bought the script, I sent another email reply, with my zipped database from my old vidiscript site.
Once you get the email that allows you to purchase the tube software, click the link, login, provide your credit card info, and finalize the sale. You should get another info with login information to get in, and download your new tubeX script. Go and get it!
After you complete the purchase of the script, and you have sent your exported database to J (in zipped format) wait for another email from J where he will provide a new text dump of your exported database. There will also be some instructions for making a few changes to your old folder names. Pretty simple stuff, and very awesome for him to make it this easy to import all of our old vidiscript files!
Now this is how I handled the rest of the vidiscript export / tubex import process.
Since my site was live and had decent traffic, I read the basic installation instructions of tubex first – it’s all fairly basic – create a new database on your server with phpadmin or whatever, upload the tubex files, login to the admin area and setup your global settings. When I felt I knew enough about the installation procedure, and I had gotten my email with the new “dump file” from J that was going to let me import all my vids to the new script – I got a a new html file ready – it said something site is down for maintenance, we are upgrading – woo hoo! – I uploaded that temporary file, and named it index.html on the server through my ftp client, and then I renamed all the old vidi folders and vidiscript files – adding something like old-vidi to the names of all of them. This way I could quickly revert to my old vidiscript style site easily if something went wrong.
I uploaded the new tubex files – get my instructions ready and followed them – you know – make some folders and files with certain permissions once you have uploaded them – login to the installation part of the script, provide database details, standard stuff. Then logged into the admin section, and followed the instructions that J had sent me in the email.
Essentially I logged into the admin section of the new tubes cript, and created categories right away. Then went to the import tab, gave it some basic info, and it sucked in all the data to import my videos, my descriptions, titles, tags, and thumbnails from my old vidiscript install – very cool!
Now, I took some extra time when doing this, because I decided to find pictures for each of my categories. I am not sure that you need to do this, but if you find yourself with some time on your hands in the times you are waiting for an email or something – find some pics that you might want to use for your categories. One of the cool new features in this tube script is that you can assign pics that go with your categories – I had not expected that option – so it I took some time to find the right pics when I was setting up the initial categories before importing. If you already have those pictures saved into a folder on your drive – the process will go much faster for you. I am guessing you can also skip the assigning pictures part and just go back later and add / edit that.
Anyhow, The import file I uploaded had about 8,500 videos – and it took some time – but at least I got a very cool percent completed bar to show me the real progress. With that many videos – I think it took about 15 minutes. Once it was done, I went back to ftp, and changed the name of that temporary maintenance file, then went to my dot com – and bam – a brand new tube site – up and running, with all my videos imported. I am one very happy camper.
Big thanks to J – and I highly recommend his script. If you decide to buy it, please do it from my affiliate link, so I can get some credit for sharing this with you. Also leave me a comment here, and maybe we can swap some links for something.
Tube X Thoughts / Considerations
The tubex script is very powerful – with many more features than vidiscript – and some people may find some of the advanced functions difficult to deploy at first. The template system is very powerful, and some may say not as easy as vidiscript to alter as quickly. I spent some time reading all the instructions, and found that is very cool to use some basic code to add banners and logs and such. I also really like the way that tubex shows related videos. J has put a function to make it easy to backup your database, use it before you do any changes to your stuff in the backend.
I love the fact that this script makes several thumbnails for processed videos, and when a user hovers over a thumbnail of the video – it shows a rotating preview from several sections of the video – very cool! One of things we all asked for with vidiscript many times. I found this out with new videos that were uploaded, and I found a way to have tubex go through my old imported videos and reprocess thumbnails to create the multi-view hover thing on them too!
One thing I learned the hard way about having all that power in the backend – it’s easy to delete a lot of stuff quickly, and by accident. With his TGP script, I made the mistake of deleting all the sponsors I had setup – when I deleted them all, it also deleted all my galleries – as they were all associated with sponsors. luckily I had a database backup and was able to revert back before I made such a sweeping change. I had not thought that deleting all the sponsors would deleted the associated galleries. Having a backup (your database and video / thumbnail files ) before you do things will definitely be a life savior.
The player has advanced functions that are not standard, it will take some coding. I am happy with the stock player, but I look forward to skinning it and doing some other stuff with it. I have already bought a commercial license for the jw player and a couple skins that I want to use.
I am considering posted some of the instructions for how I modded the template to include by logo, some ads, and some text in a box on the home page. I am also considering adding some info about how I modded it to show my terms and privacy policies in the script. This may take some poking around in the support forums to figure out at first many people. I am also considering posting my chart that I made with all the other tube software I found, the email replies I got from the various script authors on importing my vidiscript data, and some other comparisons. The short version of that chart – all the other scripts cost more, some would not import the data, and the ones that did offer help with that all said they would charge an extra $100 – $150 to make an import of the data.
If anyone would like me to post some details and stuff, give me a link or send me a couple shots of espresso and I will post some more stuff for everyone. Leave me a comment here and let me know.
Oh, there are many other things I should mention – like the awesome import in the backend of tubex which lets you import hundreds of galleries from various adult affiliates, and mark them as sponsors. This gives you access to a ton of free content that will add thousands of videos to your site in very little time. Set the sponsors during the import, and use some custom code in your template, and it will automatically display your affiliate code right under the right videos, or wherever else you want.
One thing that got me at first – when you upload new videos, or your users do – they do not show up on the site right away. I was used to the way that vidiscript did things, and kind of freaked out at first. With the tubex script, new videos are help in a queue, and they will only be converted, and added to your live site when you tell it to start converting all the vids in the queue. You can do this manually by clicking and telling it process all the new vids. You can also setup a cron job and have your server convert all in the queue at certain time of the day.
There are many other things I could talk about with this script – but this page is getting long. Maybe I will make a series of posts and categorize them in a tubex tips or something if there is interest. In the meantime, might I also suggest you check out the sponsors / adult affiliate programs that we use to import galleries with some of our site? You might want to bookmark that category, as I will be adding more sponsors and more information about how to best use them in the near future.