Viddyou: The Blog.

July 23

New Resolution & New Feature

While the bulk of tonight’s update relates to our back-end systems, there are a few changes you will be able to notice. In our last blog entry we mentioned that HD support for 1440x810 would be forthcoming, and we are excited to announce it is now available for our Premium users.

We’ve also added a new feature for all users that will allow you to record or upload a video and embed it on your blog (or MySpace, Facebook, website, etc), without having the video appear on our /explore page, or to any user (except for yourself when you’re logged in) in your viddstream.

This new feature is a great new opportunity for those that want to take advantage of the high quality video options we offer at Viddyou, but have already established other ways of sharing with their friends and families - now they can have the best of both worlds.

To take advantage of this new setting, check the “Hide On Viddyou?” option under the “More Options?” menu when uploading or recording a video. You can also select this option on videos you’ve already uploaded, from your video management page. 

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July 7

What's New This Week

Right before the Fourth of July holiday we pushed a new batch of updates. Here’s a quick overview of the two main updates:

1. We’ve overhauled the way still images are generated from your videos. Video thumbnails are now sharper, clearer and smoother.

2. We’ve added additional support for several new High Definition resolutions. This means, that in addition to the common 1280x720 and 1920x1080 HD formats, Premium members will now be able to upload several other less-popular HD variants, and have their video processed at the native, uploaded resolution. 

Here’s a complete list of the HD resolutions currently available to our Premium members: 1280x720, 1920x1080, 1440x1080, 960x720, with support for 1440x810 coming shortly.

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June 13
Today we’ve updated our video blog application for Facebook. This release now allows you to add the Video Blog application to Facebook’s Pages. So your customers, business, or fans can enjoy beautiful High Definition video, and all of the other wonderful benefits of Viddyou, right on your organization’s Facebook page. This release also fixes some minor bugs you may have encountered in Firefox or Internet Explorer. If you’ve already installed our Video Blog application on your Facebook account, there’s nothing you need to do to take advantage of the new capabilities. If you haven’t installed it yet, what are you waiting for? ;)

Today we’ve updated our video blog application for Facebook. This release now allows you to add the Video Blog application to Facebook’s Pages. So your customers, business, or fans can enjoy beautiful High Definition video, and all of the other wonderful benefits of Viddyou, right on your organization’s Facebook page.

This release also fixes some minor bugs you may have encountered in Firefox or Internet Explorer.

If you’ve already installed our Video Blog application on your Facebook account, there’s nothing you need to do to take advantage of the new capabilities. If you haven’t installed it yet, what are you waiting for? ;)

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June 12

Record Video On Your iPhone

This week saw the announcement of Apple’s new iPhone coming out in July. And while we were excited to see GPS and 3G coming in the new version, we were really bummed they still haven’t built in support for recording video (something that, to us, should be a no-brainer).

If you’re still looking for a way to record video on your iPhone we recommend using the iPhone Video Recorder by DreamCatcher, which we recently added support for. Using this application and your iPhone, uploading video to Viddyou is as easy as sending an email.

For more information on using your mobile phone to post videos to Viddyou, please check out our help section.

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June 5

Our friends at Noisepop have partnered with the SEIU (the largest Union in the country that represents hospital and healthcare workers, doormen and other service employees) to produce this short film entitled “No Free Lunch” staring Lewis Black with original music by Radio 4.

For more information about their campaign, you can read their writeup in the NY Times or head to their official website. 

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May 22

3/4 HD (960x540) Support Now Available

Today we’re announcing 960x540 support for Premium Accounts. If you work in iMovie you’ll find that the “best quality” output is 960x540 - which is 3/4 720p resolution - when Premium members submit files at this resolution we’ll now maintain those dimensions at a bitrate above our Standard Definitition videos. This is a great way for those who want a good looking video that doesn’t have the computing and bandwidth demands of 720 or 1080 HD. This is also the same resolution that the Apple TV uses.
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May 21
Tonight we’re launching a very exciting update to our popular Facebook application that will make the integration between Viddyou and Facebook tighter than ever before. Beyond an overhaul to the entire Facebook application interface so that it will look and feel like the experience you are accustomed to on Viddyou.com, we have added two new ground-breaking features: 1. Upload and record directly to Viddyou without ever leaving Facebook for free. Plus, our Premium members will be able to upload High Definition video and record for twenty minutes, just like they can on Viddyou.com.  2. The ability to designate your videos ‘Facebook Only’. This powerful new privacy setting allows you to share your videos under the same privacy restrictions that you have set up through Facebook, regardless of whether or not your Facebook friends have a Viddyou account.  In order to take advantage of these new features you’ll need to have our Facbeook Video Blog application added to your Facebook Account. Click here to add it, if you haven’t done so already. Existing users of the old version of our Facebook application will need to enter their Viddyou username and password to link their Facebook and Viddyou accounts, and take advantage of these new features.

Tonight we’re launching a very exciting update to our popular Facebook application that will make the integration between Viddyou and Facebook tighter than ever before.

Beyond an overhaul to the entire Facebook application interface so that it will look and feel like the experience you are accustomed to on Viddyou.com, we have added two new ground-breaking features:

1. Upload and record directly to Viddyou without ever leaving Facebook for free. Plus, our Premium members will be able to upload High Definition video and record for twenty minutes, just like they can on Viddyou.com. 

2. The ability to designate your videos ‘Facebook Only’. This powerful new privacy setting allows you to share your videos under the same privacy restrictions that you have set up through Facebook, regardless of whether or not your Facebook friends have a Viddyou account. 

In order to take advantage of these new features you’ll need to have our Facbeook Video Blog application added to your Facebook Account. Click here to add it, if you haven’t done so already.

Existing users of the old version of our Facebook application will need to enter their Viddyou username and password to link their Facebook and Viddyou accounts, and take advantage of these new features.

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May 18

Twitter Notification Fixed

For those of you that use our Twitter Notification feature (it sends a quick tweet whenever you post a new video), you may have noticed that recently those tweets stopped tweeting.

Thanks to Viddyou user Eilla, we became aware of the problem and were able to track it down to a change Twitter made to their API that we weren’t aware of. We’ve taken care of fixing it, and we apologize for the interruption. So everything is back to running great again! :]

Ed. Note: These things always seem to happen on Sundays, don’t they? 

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May 13

Viddyou Wordpress 2.5 Widget

Viddyou user stevenhaddox put together a sweet little widget for Wordpress 2.5 that will automatically pull in your most recent video thumbnails via RSS and create links to your latest videos, so you can have that content right on your Wordpress blog. Steven has kindly allowed everyone to benefit from his work by sharing the code he put together for the widget, so if you’re a Wordpress user be sure to check this out: http://www.stevenhaddox.com/2008/04/25/adding-recent-viddyou-videos-widget-to-wordpress-25/
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April 30
Want to beautify your city, decorate a room ANND help spread the word of Viddyou? Send an email to Ryan with your mailing address and he’ll make sure you get some of our fancy new diecut stickers in return. It’s totally free!
Want to beautify your city, decorate a room ANND help spread the word of Viddyou? Send an email to Ryan with your mailing address and he’ll make sure you get some of our fancy new diecut stickers in return. It’s totally free!
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