Pavlovia media upload fails intermittently for long webcam recordings after recent outage

OS:
macOS on Apple Silicon. Original experiment was created/synced on Mac M2; I am currently using Mac M5.

PsychoPy version:
PsychoPy 2024.2.4 standalone and PsychoPy 2026.1.3 standalone.

URLs:
Exp 1, synced with PsychoPy 2024.2.4 on Mac M5:

Exp 2, originally created/synced with PsychoPy 2024 on Mac M2, not re-synced for months:

What I am trying to do:
I have a Pavlovia experiment with webcam recording during:

  • 1-2 minute calibration routines before each movie
  • four movie-watching routines, each about 8-11 minutes long

What goes wrong:
The short calibration webcam recordings upload successfully.

The long movie webcam recordings fail intermittently during media upload with:

Error

when uploading media data for experiment: [experiment name]
SyntaxError: Unexpected token ‘<’

Sometimes one or two movie recordings upload and it fails later. Last night Exp 1 completed successfully with all four movie recordings uploaded. This morning the same Exp 1 failed again. Exp 2 was running smoothly until yesterday but now also shows the same error.

What I tried:
I tested in Chrome Incognito.

Both experiments were working until the recent Pavlovia/server outage a few days ago. Since then, large media uploads have become flaky.

When I download either experiment and re-sync it as a new Pavlovia project using PsychoPy 2026.1.3, media upload fails every time.

With PsychoPy 2024.2.4, newly synced projects are intermittent: sometimes they work, but mostly they fail.

Key point:
This seems specific to large webcam media uploads from the 8-11 minute movie recordings. The shorter calibration webcam uploads work.

Questions:

  1. Is SyntaxError: Unexpected token '<' during media upload usually caused by Pavlovia returning an HTML error page instead of JSON?
  2. Are there known size, duration, timeout, or server-load limits for webcam media uploads?
  3. Could the recent Pavlovia outage have affected reliability for larger media uploads?
  4. Has anything changed recently in PsychoJS/Pavlovia media upload handling?
  5. Are there recommended Camera settings for long webcam recordings on Pavlovia?

I posted about this few days back and at that time I thought problem is specific to 2026 version sync, but now I think it’s not version specific. SyntaxError: Unexpected token '<'" when uploading media data

Thank you!

I’ve just replicated this myself. a 60 second video recording was saved and a 12 minute video recording gave the error.

I’ll follow this up with @apitiot and report back here.