Staff Blog

It took most of the day but we've finally finished our big upgrade of all the hampster wheels that keep the lights on at Vimeo HQ. Uploads have been re-enabled. Things are still a little wonky in some areas and we're working quickly to clean them up.

Thanks for your patience!

As part of a large behind-the-scenes upgrade, we'll be turning off logins on Wednesday, August 27th for most of the morning into afternoon. You'll still be able to watch videos, but during this time everyone will be logged out and uploads will be disabled.

If you have any important videos you need to get online please do so tonight!

Vimeo is growing fast, by the end of this month we'll have 600,000 users with over 1 million videos! Since January we've grown traffic five-fold, and now serve a million videos a day. We need some fresh brains around here to help make the best website in the world even better.

We're looking for superstar web application developers:

• Have you written your own MVC framework (preferably in PHP)?
• Do you enjoy tweaking httpd.conf in your spare time?
• Can you explain EXPLAIN?
• Have you worked with INNODB on tables with millions of rows?
• Can you tell when a machine is swapping?
• Do you have experience with cloud (EC2) or virtualized (Xen) environments?
• Have you changed your legal middle name to "scalable"?

We're looking for superstar Flash developers:

• Do you have OOP experience in a language other than Flash?
• Does the prospect of your SWF being loaded 7 million times a day excite you?
• You have demonstrable design experience?
• Have you built a Flash video player before?
• Have you built Air applications?

We're also looking for year-round community apprentices. We really want apprentices from inside our wonderful community, so if you or anyone you know might be interested, please pass this along. Here are our requirements:

• Be well versed in "internet"
• Know your way around the Vimeo website and community
• Be creative
• Like to watch and make videos

Your days will consist of:

• Working closely with dalas and Blake on community support and answering help emails
• Watching and organizing tons of videos
• Monitoring the site and testing new features
• Carrying on "The Intern Net Show"
• Giving high-fives and getting coffee

These jobs are located in the infamous Connected Ventures offices in sunny loud Union Square, Manhattan-- you have to be in commuting distance. If you think you'd fit in, shoot an email to morlocks@vimeo.com with a link to your Vimeo account (yes you need one), some links to some work you're proud of and a short description about yourself.

We look forward to hearing from you!

We're struggling to fix yet another outage at one of our datacenters (it's been a tough two weeks). This is what has been causing the "Sorry this video is no longer available" error for new videos along with long wait times to encode videos. Don't worry, we'll eventually repair all the broken videos and get everything encoded, but for mean time uploads are disabled. Thanks for your patience!

Update: We've pushed a fix that should re-enable encoding so anyone waiting in line should have their video encoded in the next few hours. Next job is to locate any broken videos from earlier today and re-encode them. Uploads are still off for now and will probably remain off until the morning.

Update 2: Uploading had been restored. Please report any new problems here.

Here's a weekend project I'm looking forward to seeing results for:

Make a video describing a new game that you have created. Make sure you explain the rules and include shots of people playing the game. If your game is really fun, it could spread to the four corners of the Internet!

Post your videos to the Weekend Project group, and remember, no old videos, make something fresh for the project.

We apologize for the downtime today and the other small issues that have cropped up during today.

We were working on upgrading some features of the website when we were hit with a major outage. We had to do a lot of work to get everything working right, and if you're still experiencing some issues, please know that we will work on them tomorrow during business hours.

One side effect of these problems is that anyone who uploaded videos in the past 5-6 hours might need to upload them again if you find your video is not working properly.

Again, we're sorry for the issues and we're working to fix everything.

So this week's project is a call to experiment making videos using photographs.

Project: Create a video of your morning routine using only photos.

As always, only post videos you create for this project and make sure to add it to the Weekend Project group.

If you don't know what photomotion is, check out the Photomotion Channel for some inspiration.

Have fun and be creative.

Over the last few years, we've seen a remarkable increase in non-professional video cameras. Be it using webcams, cell phones, or digital cameras, people are making creative films using all sorts of alternative means. And with popular video sharing sites such as Vimeo, sharing these creative new films has never been easier.



The Disposable Film Festival celebrates films created with these non-professional devices, and Vimeo is proud to be a leading sponsor for this festival.

We encourage you to submit any disposable films you have created to the Disposable Film Festival Site.

Once you submit your film, please tag it with 'DFF' so they can add it to the Disposable Film Festival Channel on Vimeo.

The deadline is August 31st, so go make a film or submit any you have already made. Remember, it only takes a cell phone or digital camera and little bit of creativity!