Staff Blog

Yes, it is April Fools day.

No, the site isn't redirecting you to BoobTube or anything.

But... we do have a little surprise for those of you with keen eyes and Sherlock-like wits.

We, the Staff, collectively challenge you all to a treasure hunt of sorts. Somewhere in the dungeons of Vimeo, perhaps where you least expect it, perhaps closer than you could ever imagine, lies a quirky little April Fools tweak to the site.

We challenge you.... no, we double-dog dare you to find it.

The first to do so, will win 500mb extra storage a week. Those who do not, will be banned from Vimeo FOREVER!

Hey guys,

We made a Facebook app! It's been a good time coming, but it's finally done. And we're pretty proud of how it turned out.



The main benefit to you is adding a Vimeo box on your Facebook profile to showcase up to date streams of videos you upload, like, and appear in. This allows your Facebook friends to see the videos you put on Vimeo.

The other piece of the app, the Vimeo canvas page, serves as an entry level version of Vimeo for new fans of Vimeo. They can start commenting, liking videos, and uploading all from Facebook.

The app was developed by Kevin and myself, with support from Sox, Blake, and Andrew!

Hopefully we'll get your videos out to as many people as you want seeing them, and adopt some new friends to the Vimeo community.

You can add the app here.

Thanks!

UPDATE: If you run into a problem where Facebook prompts you to login repeatedly, try going here. We're aware of this problem, and will fix it soon.

Are you ever sitting there on your pony, and/or in your hot tub just wondering what crazy new features we're working on for Vimeo?

Well, now you can find out. Check out the Making the Vimeo page for a list of all the major features we're currently working on. You can check out sneak peak videos about the projects, photos of the design and development, and even give feedback on the features right there on the page. We'll be keeping this pretty fresh so make sure to come back every once in a while to see whats in the oven.


love,

Vimeo (and Toyota!)


(We will link to this page in the 'Feature Requests' forum for now, and the new 'about us' page that we're going to launch soon too)

In the past, videos over 848 pixels wide went through the HD conversion process. We have decided to raise this requirement to 1280 x 720 pixels, which was our intent from the beginning. I expect there to be some backlash over this, but we just feel that upsampling videos to "cheat" HD is not worth the extra space and conversion time.

On the bright side, now you have a reason to buy an HD camera! Also, we're testing out 30 fps HD conversion at the moment, which is good news for those of you uploading 30 fps HD videos.

After tireless hours of compiling feedback and feature requests, sleepless nights of design and development, and a few more goat massacres sacrifices, we would like to introduce to you, your new Home.

We're really excited about this next big step for Vimeo and we hope these improvements will help you have a richer experience while you're here.

A few improvements we'd like to bring special attention to:

- Sorting your inbox by videos uploaded, liked, shared, etc. This feature allows you to really get right to the videos you want to watch.

- Delete videos from your inbox. Hit that red 'X' and you will never see that video in your inbox again.

- Stats Module: now you can check out all your video stats aggregated from the last week. And check out that sexy graph!

- Discover Tab: sort by 'popular videos', 'popular channels', 'staff picks' and 'random' -- We're really excited to give you guys the ability to troll through Vimeo, so go discover new videos!

Thanks to everyone here at Vimeo HQ for their hard work making this new Home come to life!

No biggie, just some small tweaks we've made recently.

-You can now easily post your videos to your MySpace profile using the Share function.

-The number of "Likes" you can have was increased from 1000 to 2000.

-You can now make a Channel or Album into a "badge" widget from the Tools menu.

-The Tag Browser [click on any tag to see it] now shows you related tags so that you can find more clips you might be interested in.

-The "Love At First Bite" contest has been extended to March 31.

So it seems like things have cooled off a bit in terms of the high volume of uploads. We've added a few more machines which has cut the conversion time down considerably. Thank Peter, Ted, and Andrew for their hard work on this, and hopefully we'll be ready for the next big spike.

Thanks again for everyone's patience.

Love,

Vimeo

p.s. We're just about to launch something new and big. People get ready!

Update: Things seem to be back to normal for now, there may still be some delays later. For a video recap of this post, be sure to check out this video by Carleton Torpin.

If you've uploaded a video in the past 48 hours or so you've probably noticed the extremely long wait times when it comes to your video getting converted to Flash. First off, we're sorry! Around here minimizing the amount of time it takes from upload to viewing has always been a priority, so having to wait around for hours to see your video is just unacceptable.

Here's a little background on why this is happening:

Over the past several months we've been planning to beef up our Flash encoding infrastructure to be able to encode a lot more videos at the same time. These improvements are still a few weeks a way. Earlier this week, Stage6 (a well-known and large video sharing site) announced they were shutting down completely, and users only had until the end of this week to move their videos off. For us, this is a good problem. A lot of great people from Stage6 have migrated here (hi guys!), brought some awesome videos with them, and we're very excited to have them. Unfortunately, this sudden and extreme influx crossed a tipping point where people were uploading faster than we could encode given our current setup. Normally, a backup like this clears up quickly when traffic dies down. However, people were uploading at a furious pace right through the night, and our encoding servers just haven't had a chance to catch up.

Today we've taken some immediate steps to fix the problem:

- Added extra encoding machines (including borrowing some from our office buddies at CollegeHumor)
- Rolled out additional upload servers so transfer times stay speedy
- Temporarily reduced the number of thumbnails you can choose to 3 (you can still upload custom thumbnails)
- Optimized our internal file shuffling techniques so things get where they need to be faster
- Sacrificed a goat

Just to give you a sense of the level of traffic we're dealing with right now, on Monday we had more uploads in one hour that we did in an average day a year ago. At peak hours yesterday we were getting 50-75% more uploads than we were last week. Thanks to Peter, we've managed to speed up the encoding process significantly and it looks like we've reached a point where we can stay ahead of the flood of videos coming our way.

Unfortunately, it's still going to take awhile to work though the videos that are currently queued up. We may disable uploading for a few hours tonight (after 12 am EST) to allow our machines to catch up.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience. In the mean time, grab a drink and relax. We'll automatically email you when your video has finished encoding.