Sermon Download Size Limit

First off I wish to thank you for creating this fantastic product. I just installed and configured the product for our church website and are nearing the time to allow access to this feature. I think it will make a wonderful additon to our site and will be much appreciated by our viewers. So thank you again.

Everything has gone great so far with installation and configuration. I've run into one issue that I'm confident can be resolved but could just use some experienced advice. Our mp3 sermons, even after compression, end up around 22mb. When I attempt to use Sermon Speaker to download the sermon, it seems to have issue with the size. No error messages. But the file it downloads is basically empty. If I compress the file down below 10mb or use the default_sermon provided, the download works great. Is there a download size limitation within Joomla or php that would cause this and if so, do you have advice on how to correct the issue. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Hi Bob

I'm glad you enjoy SermonSpeaker. It's always nice to see people actually using the stuff I write

The problem with the download usually is in fact the size. The restriction however isn't in SermonSpeaker but in the servers php settings. If you look at the apache error log, you probably see a fatal error "out of memory". SermonSpeaker tries to override the memory limitations, but this could be prevented by server settings.
The setting in question is the "memory_limit" directive in the php.ini. Maybe the "max_execution_time" also plays a role, but usually it's the memory_limit which prevents a proper function.

If you have a shared server, you may have to contact your hoster to raise the limit.

Thank you Thomas for the quick reply. I just went out and ran a phpinfo() on our shared server and these are the results of the two items you suggested I look at:
max_execution_time = 50,000
memory_limit = 40M

Based on your experience, do these numbers seem high enough or do one or both need to be increased and to what level? I have some php experience but I'm just not sure what level of memory a 22mb download would require so I would be very grateful for any input you have on this.

Thanks!!!

I don't really know this. I have my own server and have it set to 128M by default. I also use smaller files, so I didn't really had any problems with it.

I know that the memory_limit is an "overall" thing, meaning it has to hold also the whole php code and the file. So it may use more memory than the actual file, I just have no clue how much memory php uses for Joomla itself.
If you have access to the error log, you may check if it's indeed the memory_limit.
You can ask your hoster to raise it anyway, as 40M is a bit low nowadays. PHP 5.3+ has a default value of 128M, but it was much lower in earlier releases (8M and 16M).

I think the time (50secs) should be enough.

Hi Thomas
I'm not sure what made me think of this but I realized that I never followed back up with you to share what I found. Sorry about that.

As it turns out, the Hosting Service my church uses is a shared account and will not allow us to modify the Memory Limit in PHP. Ours is currently at 40M. As a work around, I found that if I lowered the quality level of the MP3 files reducing the file size, then the download worked again. So as a reference point, with our 40M limit, I found that getting the sermons from the original 18-20mb size down to about 9-11mb size did the trick (just in case anyone else has this issue). Although the quality was lowered, the MP3s still sounded very good.

I also have access to another hosting service which has it's memory limit at 60mb. I installed Sermon Speaker there and put out the larger sermon (18mb) and it worked fine. So the memory limit is key to using larger MP3 files.

Our church is considering moving its site to a dedicated server where we will have more control over the PHP settings and have higher bandwidth allowances.

I hope these numbers help someone else out and again, want to thank you Thomas for your help. Our church really loves having the sermons available online like this.

i've talked to some of other churches that have been doing this for years, and they keep bitrate at 64 no and mono and from what they say is that you can go to about 48 and and keep semons at mono and it will not affect sermon quality. i'm doing mine at 64 right now and stereo and 1 hour sermon is coming out to be at about 24MB.