Troubleshooting

Videos are not streameable in Telegram app

Only some videos can be played on Telegram without downloading them first. To stream your video in Telegram you must convert it before uploading it. For example you can use ffmpeg to convert your video to mp4:

$ ffmpeg -i input.mov -preset slow -codec:a libfdk_aac -b:a 128k \
         -codec:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 2500k -minrate 1500k \
         -maxrate 4000k -bufsize 5000k -vf scale=-1:720 output.mp4

You can see the Supported file types reference for more information.

Database is locked

Telegram-upload is already running, or an old process has locked the session (telegram-upload.session). Only one Telegram-upload session can be run at a time.

If you need to run Telegram-upload multiple times anyway, you need to duplicate the session and config files:

  1. Copy the session file (~/.config/telegram-upload.session) to another path.

  2. Copy the configuration file (~/.config/telegram-upload.json) to another path.

  3. Edit this file and add the path to session file like this: {"api_id": 0, "api_hash": "...", "session": "/path/to/telegram-upload.json"}.

  4. Run using --config /path/to/telegram-upload.json.

If you are sure that Telegram-upload is not running, search for the process that is blocking the file:

fuser ~/.config/telegram-upload.session

As a last resort, you can restart your machine.

I am getting 429 errors during upload

Since version v0.7.0 Telegram-upload uploads several parts of the file in parallel. Become of this, the Telegram API can become overloaded and return 429 errors. This is normal and you don’t have to worry. If you are getting too many of these errors, you can try to reduce the number of parallel uploads using the PARALLEL_UPLOAD_BLOCKS environment variable. For example:

$ PARALLEL_UPLOAD_BLOCKS=2 telegram-upload video.mkv

Or exporting the variable:

$ export PARALLEL_UPLOAD_BLOCKS=2
$ telegram-upload video.mkv

The default value is 4. Values above this value can increase the number of 429 errors. Telegram-upload in case of an error will try to reconnect to the API before TELEGRAM_UPLOAD_MIN_RECONNECT_WAIT seconds. The default value is 2. This value will be increased with each retry. Each retry will decrease the number of PARALLEL_UPLOAD_BLOCKS. The minimum of PARALLEL_UPLOAD_BLOCKS is one. Telegram-upload will retry connecting up to TELEGRAM_UPLOAD_MAX_RECONNECT_RETRIES times. The default value is 5. Each retry has a maximum wait time of TELEGRAM_UPLOAD_RECONNECT_TIMEOUT seconds before failing. All of these variables can be defined using environment variables.

Read more about the parallel chunks in the Upload benchmarks section.

Telegram-upload does not work! An error occurs when executing it

Telegram-upload is not tested with all versions of all dependencies it uses. If you have installed Telegram-upload on your system (using root) maybe some existing dependency is on an incompatible version. You can try updating the dependencies carefully:

$ pip install -U telegram-upload Telethon hachoir cryptg click

To avoid errors it is recommended to use virtualenvs.

Before asking for help, remember to find out if the issue already exists. If you open a ticket remember to paste your system dependencies on the issue:

$ pip freeze

Some problems may not be related to Telegram-upload. If possible, Google before asking.

Telegram-upload is very slow uploading files!

Telegram-upload since version v0.7.0 uploads several parts of the file in parallel. This can increase the upload speed of the files. By default it uploads 4 parts of the file in parallel. You can change this value using the PARALLEL_UPLOAD_BLOCKS environment variable (read more about this in the I am getting 429 errors during upload section). Make sure you have updated Telegram-upload to the latest version and you have libssl installed on your system and cryptg installed on your Python environment.

Read more about the Telegram-upload speed in the Upload benchmarks section.