Uploads were read in the browser with FileReader, base64'd, and posted as one
JSON document holding every source — so a phone video was a ~700 MB string in the
browser, another copy in the request, and another in the handler, and nginx's 1 MB
default rejected it long before any of that mattered.

Now the browser POSTs each File as a raw body to /api/upload, which streams it to
disk a megabyte at a time and hands back a path; extraction takes paths. Nothing
base64s client-side, and neither end ever holds a whole file. JSON bodies are
capped at 32 MB (they only carry settings now) and the upload endpoint is
dispatched before the body is parsed, since it is binary.

Big videos are also frame-sampled LOCALLY before anything is sent: the extractor
only ever looks at evenly-spaced frames, so shipping 24 of them instead of the
film is the same result for a fraction of the traffic (--max-upload-mb, default
64; 0 sends the file). Oversized stills are downscaled to 2048px, and voice
cloning now sends a 90s mono clip rather than the entire soundtrack.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0182DhR1eFNPQyGmDrpHbedY