Viddyou: The Blog.

DNS Move Tonight

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:39:04 -0700

Tonight we’re moving some of our DNS servers. This update should be transparent and hopefully will not affect any of our members, but because of oddities in the global propagation of DNS data there is a very slight chance you may briefly be unable to visit Viddyou.com. If you continue to have problems visiting Viddyou please feel free to contact our support team.

New Resolution & New Feature

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:06:00 -0700

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.

What's New This Week

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:15:26 -0700

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.

Today we’ve updated our video blog application for...

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:40:18 -0700

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 fo r? ;)

Record Video On Your iPhone

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:15:00 -0700

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.

Our friends at Noisepop have partnered with the SEIU (the...

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:49:00 -0700

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.

3/4 HD (960x540) Support Now Available

Thu, 22 May 2008 17:05:10 -0700

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.

Tonight we’re launching a very exciting update to our...

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:11:00 -0700

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. C lick 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.

Twitter Notification Fixed

Sun, 18 May 2008 21:41:34 -0700

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?

Viddyou Wordpress 2.5 Widget

Tue, 13 May 2008 01:09:45 -0700

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/

Want to beautify your city, decorate a room ANND help spread the...

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:11:29 -0700

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!

Video Embed Change

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:11:36 -0700

It seems that a lot of our users were having problems with the update to the embed code that we added about a month ago. Specifically, the HTML that surrounded the embeded video was often being manipulated in unfavorable ways by several popular sites (MySpace, LiveJournal, and a few others).

So, we’ve temporarily removed the HTML code surrounding the embed while we work on a more permanent solution. If you have an embedded video that previously wasn’t showing up properly, just grab the new embed code (by clicking on the ‘Share’ button when viewing your video), and replace it with the old one that wasn’t working right.

Tonight's Update

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:11:16 -0700

We’re always working to make Viddyou better and tonight’s update will once again increase the quality of 720p videos to even higher levels than before. We’re also fixing an issue where some of you weren’t able to properly tag your videos when uploading. Look for these changes to go live in the next couple of minutes.

Next up: An update to our Facebook Application, providing you even tighter integration between your friends and family on Facebook, and your videos on Viddyou.

Video Processing Delay

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:27:00 -0700

One of our video processing servers had a temporary issue, and as a result some of the videos uploaded to that server were not processed promptly. We’re working to manually process the queue now, and we expect to have operations returned to normal by 3:30pm PT. We greatly apologize for this delay.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email me directly: aaronw@viddyou.com

Video Player Update

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:10:34 -0700

We’ve pushed an update that includes several optimizations to our video player for decreased load times, and an overall increase in snappiness.

Additionally, we found that some slower computers, and computers being run in virtualized environments were sporadically seeing the loading graphic quickly appear and then disappear while their video was playing normally. The latest update to our video player fixes this issue.

You may need to quit your browser or empty your cache (also sometimes called “Temporary Internet Files”) in order to receive the update.

Homepage Algorithm Update

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:34:48 -0700

Tonight we’re pushing an update that affects our internal weighting system responsible for selecting the lucky four videos to featured on the homepage every day. The new system is designed to showcase videos from our community that represent what the Viddyou experience is all about.

While we generally keep our “secret sauce” somewhat private, I can tell you that our automated system takes over twelve different factors into account when selecting the featured videos for the day including: relevance, activity, quality, and community feedback. Only videos that have their privacy setting set to “Public” are considered for the front page.

We hope you enjoy the change and discover some new cool people on Viddyou!

O'Grady's Powerpage Reviews Viddyou

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:24:13 -0700

Huge thanks To Powerpage.org for their great review of us!

I’ll excerpt a few quotes here, but you should head over to the site to read the full review:

“The design is gorgeous.”

“Viddyou eliminates all the junk and focuses on what they know: video.”

“Unbelievable. That’s streaming. Right now. The quality here makes it difficult to believe we have survived so far with all the painfully low quality garbage out there.”

Tonight's Update

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:43:26 -0700

Normally we don’t post about the small incremental bug fixes and tweaks that happen on a regular basis, but tonight’s code update is special: we’re increasing the video bitrate of our standard definition videos 20% to 600k. All of the new videos you upload should now have a noticeable increase in quality. Enjoy :]

A Little Bit 'O Love

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:12:11 -0700

Today we announced an exciting new release and as a result of it we’ve some really nice coverage. Big thanks to all those that have written about us, helping to spread the word of beautiful video!

I’ll link to them here as they come in:

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/03/18/first-impressions-viddyou-premium

http://legendmag.net/thelegendonline/?p=324

http://mashable.com/2008/03/19/viddyou-hd/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/19/viddyou-debuts-high-definition-video-and-premium-memberships/

http://www.901am.com/2008/viddyou-inc-launches-1080p-services-for-personal-video.html

http://newteevee.com/2008/03/19/viddyou-joins-the-hd-chorus/

http://blog.afi.com/tech/index.php/2008/03/19/viddyou-debuts-high-definition-video-and-premium-memberships/

http://www.marketingvox.com/subscription-based-viddyou-brings-hd-quality-to-online-video-037454/

http://fr.mashable.com/2008/03/20/viddyou-partage-de-videos-hd/

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/03/20/viddyou-takes-online-video-sharing-to-1080p/

http://visionwiz.blogspot.com/2008/03/viddyou-is-best-place-for-sharing-your.html

http://hiperdef.com/2008/03/24/viddyou-se-pasa-a-los-videos-en-1080p/

Slow Transcodes On Some Videos

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:12:40 -0700

You may have noticed that it has taken an unexpectedly long time for some of your videos to process today. We’ve fixed the issue (on Easter Sunday no less!) and are now working to process the back-log of videos. Things should be normal within the hour (approx by 10pm PT).