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Archive for Technology

Important Information About Playback on iPads and iPhones

03 Oct 2011
Ian
article by:
Ian

Apple is going to release iOS 5, the latest version of their mobile operating system, for iPads the iPhones 3GS & iPhone4 and 3rd+ Generation iPod Touches (as well as any new hardware Apple announces this year). Your vzaar embed code generated before September 28th 2011, will not playback video on devices with the new operating system. To ensure full compatibility with iOS 5 you need to update the video embed code that you are currently using.

We have created a comprehensive help document to show you what has changed in the embed code and how you should replace the old embed code with the new.

read_help_doc

Below are answers to some of the questions we expect you to have:

Why has this issue occurred?
Apple has made a change to their mobile operating system so we have altered the embed code to ensure full compatibility.

Why can’t vzaar make a change to its server to ensure iOS 5 compatibility?
We have looked into this but due to the technical nature of Apple’s change, it is not possible to address this issue from the server side.

I want playback on iOS 5 devices (iPhones & iPads) what should I do?
You need to replace the embed code on your sites for any videos embedded before Wednesday 20th September 2011 with the new embed code with either the HTML5 style embed code or the new IFRAME embed code to enable your videos to playback on iPhones and iPads running iOS 5.

What are the embed code options?
You now have a choice between the standard HTML5 style embed code that you’ve been using up until now, or a new IFRAME embed code. Read more here to find out what option is right for you.

How do I do this?
Login to your vzaar account and go to your video page to get your embed code. Replace the embed code on your site with this new embed code.

When should I replace the embed code on my website?
We suggest that you start changing your embed code as soon as possible so that when the update occurs your videos will playback.

Where can I find the new embed code?
All the embed codes on vzaar have now been updated. The new embed code is located in the same place on your video page. See here for further information on where to find your embed code.

Do I need to re-upload my videos?
You do not need to re-upload your videos.

What is iOS 5 and what devices does it run on?
iOS 5 is Apple’s next release of their mobile operating system. This will run on the iPad, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 3rd & 4th Generations and any devices announced this year.

When is iOS 5 going to be released?
Apple have not specified the release date but we believe this will happen in October 2011.

I have more questions?…
If you have further questions or would like to speak to a member of our support team please contact us. Our contact information can be found here.

Categories Community, Technology, Video Advice
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An apology and explanation for yesterdays outage

22 Apr 2011
Chief Geek
article by:
Chief Geek

Just a short update about the outage we had yesterday. At about 5:30pm (GMT) yesterday, our automated systems alerted us that we had a problem and that systems where down.
Immediately we mobilised our team to investigate. Unfortunately we were hit by the major Amazon AWS outage that had affected many sites on the internet .
We worked on looking for a quick workaround or solution but a combinations of factors meant this wasn’t simple to do. We received criticism on twitter for not thinking about redundancy. Redundancy is something we take very seriously and continually work on improving this throughout our system. Some systems however are easier to build in redundancy than others, and this extensive AWS outage took out the redundant systems as well.
We worked till late into the night here and as Amazon was able to restore services to components of their platform we were able to shift some of the affected components onto new working servers.
Today we have been doing maintenance work to improve the system after these issues and will continue to do so. We will also continue to look at ways of improving our robustness and reliability and try prohibit such a severe issue from happening again.

Whilst we in no way are pointing the blame on Amazon (and feel they have done their utmost in restoring services) this outage was something unusual from such a large provider. We’ll take more steps to mitigate against this type of issue in the future.

This couldn’t have happened at worse time, being the Easter Weekend in Europe just after the team left the office, during the peak of business in the US. Please be assured the whole team was working their best to resolve the issue.

If any customers who have questions or further concerns, please contact us via the support or phone system on Tuesday. Myself (CTO) and our CEO (Stephen) will be available to speak with any customers personally and discuss anything you may wish to cover.

Again the utmost of apologies to all our customers. We pride ourself on our reliability and will be working harder to prevent issues like this happening again

Categories Technology
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Announcing the vzaar iPhone app …

09 Jun 2010
Chief Geek
article by:
Chief Geek

Click to download on the app store We have some great news from the vzaar tech department today. And since it’s all Apple related we feel it’s well timed with the announcement of the iPhone 4 this week.

Firstly we have a vzaar application available today from the app store. Click here to download it. The vzaar app gives you full control of your vzaar account from all Apple iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and on devices with a camera you can even edit and upload video directly.

We built this using our API and the Objective C library we built (see more about our API on our developer hub). The library and application was built by Daniel Kennett of Kennettnet. He’s done a fantastic job, and any iOS developer picking up the framework will be able to build video into there own iPhone/iPad and OSX applications very easily.

And finally…

… a bit of fun to announce the framework. We did a little labs / skunkworks project that sends your  Twitter location to Google Latitude. It’s not really video related we know, but we thought it was kinda fun and that it would be of use to the kinds of developers out there who might be building Apple Apps and would find the vzaar video API framework just what the needed. You can see this here, under vzaar labs: http://vzaar.com/labs/location-sync/

Categories Technology
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What’s Adobe up to?

26 Apr 2010
Ian
article by:
Ian

Evi one of our techies attended ‘Adobe Flash Camp 2010 in Bucharest’ last Thursday and has come back with some thoughts he wanted to share…

Last week I attend the Adobe Flash Camp in Romania and I received some interesting hints about what to soon expect from Adobe and what effects this would have on our industry.

Flash Player on Mobile device
Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe, has confirmed that development of Flash for iPhone is dead. (Read more: Adobe throws in the towel on Flash for iPhone).

Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow indicated Monday that Adobe’s efforts to bring Flash capabilities to Smartphone’s are a result of substantial support from Apple’s major rivals.

“We are able to get tremendous performance on Android devices because Google and the various handset manufacturers have chosen to work closely with us to provide the best possible experience to the end user,”

Though Brimelow declined to give a precise release date for Flash Player 10.1, recent comments from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen indicate that it will come in time to help developers release compatible products in the second half of 2010. For example, he told Fox Business News last week that Adobe has a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with the company to bring Flash to their mobile devices.

“So companies like Google and RIM and Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on Smartphone’s and tablets in the second half of the year,”

(Ref.: Top Tech News)

Adobe has pretty amazing plans for its Flash Player, especially for its mobile version, it’s not just about actual platform coverage, but development tools that will have new features like hardware accelerated processing, multi-touch and so on, you can already have an idea about new ActionScript language additions if you looking at recently published beta docs. One of the biggest announcements Adobe did last week here is that Flex for Mobile devices would be available somewhere this year, as understood we should expect it somewhere this summer. Adobe obviously had to make this move, especially now when it’s rival Microsoft came up with new Silverlight version and development tools for Windows Mobile 7.

Changes in Video processing
While we are all expecting proper flash video support on mobile devices to appear this summer, Google are to open source On2’s $124.6m video codec (Source: The Register). For so long, video on the Internet was pretty straight forward; you used Adobe Flash, with its 95% plus market share, and that was that. Then things changed. The next Web standard, HTML 5, came along, but it didn’t spell out that Flash or anything else would be the video codec standard.

Then, Apple refused to have anything to do with Flash on its ‘i’ family of devices. Now it seems Google may be open-sourcing the VP8 video codec. Internet video is about to get a lot more complicated (Ref: ComputerWorld).

Whatever its intentions with the On2 codec are, when it comes to the issue of free and open video playback, Google has spent the past few months playing both sides of the fence. Along with Opera and Mozilla, Google attempted to include the free and open Ogg Theora codec as a requirement of the HTML5 video tag. But its Chrome browser uses both Ogg Theora and the patent-tied H.264 codec, and Google has received criticism from the likes of Mozilla for continuing to use Adobe Flash and H.264 on YouTube.

Google could at least balance out its Flash play by open sourcing VP8, a higher quality codec than Ogg. OggTheora is actually based on an earlier incarnation of the On2 codec, VP3. In 2001, On2 opened VP3 under an irrevocable free license.
But that still leaves Apple and Microsoft. Apple uses H.264 with its Safari browser, arguing that Ogg is burdened by scant hardware support and an “uncertain patent landscape,” and one wonders if the “Jobs” cult would apply the same arguments to an open source VP8. Meanwhile, Microsoft just announced that the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 will lean on H.264 as well.

According to company open source guru Chris DiBona, Google has continued to use Flash on YouTube because Ogg can’t match the performance of H.264. But presumably, an open VP8 would solve this alleged performance issue. When On2 introduced VP8 in 2008, it promised “50 per cent bandwidth savings compared to H.264.”

Categories Technology
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Consume Video On The Go With Video Podcasting

04 Mar 2010
Ian
article by:
Ian

Another week, another new feature for our users to enjoy!

This time we’ve been playing around with new ideas on allowing users to increase the syndication of their video content. We already offer enable users to submit their content to Google search results with Search Enhancer and now by adding Video Podcasting, customers will be able to watch and consume your videos through iTunes or mobile devices such as the iPhone or the iPod.

A simple feature to use, vzaar provides all paying customers, with a simple RSS feed that when clicked will fire up iTunes on the customer’s device and automatically download your latest feed of videos in mp4 format. The customer will then be able to play and view those videos either directly through iTunes or by copying that content across to their iPhone, iPod or iTouch. That means video on the go – cool eh?!

Detailed instructions on how to use this feature can be seen here.

Submitting Your Podcast to iTunes

If you want to submit your video feed to the iTunes library then that is also possible. You can follow steps on how to do this here.

Technical Notes

1. The videos will be downloaded in mp4 format.
2. The customer will now have a saved copy of your video on their PC.
3. Different Apple products (ie iPhone, Apple TV etc) have different specifications for viewing video. It is therefore possible that certain versions of your video, for example a HD video, or a video of a certain size, will not play. You can review these specifications, product by product here.

Categories Technology, Video Advice
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