muveeMix

Entry Date: January 16th, 2007

Limelight Networks supplies CDN

We’re very proud to announce the immediate upgrade of our muveeMix network architecture. Thanks to the guys from Limelight Networks your muvees are now served via our CDN. This will bring your productions one step closer to the target audience so that they can enjoy them without the usual jitter caused by network latency.

The news report on Limelight’s website has the following to say:

“Optimized for high-performance delivery of vast amounts of rich media, Limelight Networks enables muvee to quickly and reliably respond to high user demand for its software and new online video mixing service as consumers embrace its innovative new video technology.”

For example, imagine that someone in Europe watches your muvee; at the same time, this muvee will be transferred to a server closest to that visitor. When more people around that area watch your muvee they don’t have to download it from our server directly; instead they can download it from its cached location on the CDN.
This feature doesn’t increase the upload speed to our website when you’re sending photos and videos across. Nevertheless, we hope you’ll be happy with this network improvement, and in the meantime we’ll be working behind the scenes to make your experience with muveeMix as positive as possible.

Entry Date: December 27th, 2006

Service disruptions on Wed, 27th December 2006

Due to earthquakes off Taiwan this Wednesday, our service is facing severe delays in video creation. Communication between the website (hosted in the USA) and our video creation service (hosted in Singapore) is starting to become more stable, but it will probably take one more day to fully recover.

In the meantime we’ll do our best to process the queued videos as soon as possible.

Update: 3rd of January 2007

Happy new year!! Our service has been restored to its full capacity. The quake affected three major Asian networks, which resulted in extremely high volumes of traffic on the still functional lines. After 48 hours we were still experiencing network problems, but those quickly subsided to tolerable levels.

In cases like this it’s easy to forget who the true victims of this incident are. It goes without saying that we feel for all the earthquake victims and may they and their families quickly recover and share the happiness of the new year.

Entry Date: December 19th, 2006

What’s cooking?

It’s been a while since our last update. We’re aiming to have one more refresh before Christmas to fix some of the reported issues and other glitches.

But we’re not stopping there. So what’s in store for next year? Some features we’re currently exploring are:

• Upload to YouTube support - I’m currently working with the development team from YouTube and we’re making good progress; we expect to have this feature in by Q1 2007
• Better quality videos - all this time we’re making you wait for your video, and the result aren’t always that impressive. Instead of trying to eliminate the waiting time, why not produce videos that are more stunning?
• Faster download times - we’re working together with our CDN provider to distribute your videos across the globe for faster access by your friends or families overseas.

The above are just technical features and improvements; on top of this we’re also improving the user interface to make online video creation a breeze!

Until the next wassup!

Entry Date: December 7th, 2006

Mix Master Tip: Want cooler muvees? Put that VIDEO in it!

We had some folks telling us how much they enjoyed muveeMix as a tool for creating photo slideshows. Thanks guys! And if you think our photo slideshows are cool, there’s more you could do to make it cooler - add videos. Yep! That’s it…

muveeMix works its magic best when short video clips are blended with an array of pictures so that the entire production is cut to the pace of music – just like how the transitions seem to come in at the right time and place in a music video.

[video clip(s) lasting 1 to 3 minutes each + 10 pictures at least + music lasting at least 1.5 minutes] should do the basic trick but do put in as much media as you can and reach that 100MB limit.

Besides, motion pictures always seem to be able to charge up that adrenalin or induce that nostalgia ache in us more readily than just static pictures. Well, that’s how we see it. Whatcha think?

So now you know how easy it is, remember to capture that few minutes of cake smashing action at the next birthday party or the dancing busker while touring the streets. And don’t worry about editing it. We’ll be with you on this. Just add it into your muveeMix concoction and enjoy that moment of marvel - true blue effortless cool.

Entry Date: December 3rd, 2006

Hotmail thinks muveeMix emails are junk

As you may know, our service requires registration via an activation system. We send out an email upon registration to make sure the specified email address is (still) in use. After clicking the activation link within the email, the user is activated and no further action is required.

Recently, we’ve noticed that many activation e-mails were never opened, primarily by Hotmail users. To find out why this happens, I used my own Hotmail account to register at muveeMix. At that point I noticed that the activation email went straight to the Junk folder instead of the regular mail box. Since then, I’ve been into discussions with Microsoft Email Delivery Support to find out what’s wrong with our emails.

So far we’ve increased the reputability of our mail server by adding SPF and DomainKeys, which works for both Gmail and Yahoo! (Gmail actually supports both of these frameworks), but so far we haven’t been successful to pass through Microsoft’s SmartScreen™ process. One interesting response I’ve gotten was “Your email looks like spam, but we can’t tell you why as this would render our scanner useless”; good point

In any case, this case is under further investigation and I hope to update you soon on any signs of success.

Update: 04-Dec-2006

Hotmail came back to us saying that our domain has been added to their SenderID program; after two working days the changes should be propagated through their network. In hopeful joy we wait

Update: 07-Dec-2006

Our prayers have been answered! All those sleepless nights have come to an end! Our emails are now accepted on Hotmail accounts as being reputable. Their explanation:

“The deliverability issues on your IP address were based on negative filter verdicts and/or other IP reputation problems”

This is a good lesson to learn for all who are setting up a dedicated host on a recycled IP address

Entry Date: November 28th, 2006

Short review on Gear Live

Sheila Franklin posted a short review of our service on Gear Live, and this is what she had to say:

“MuveeMix is a new site that makes it possible to upload your MP3s and videos, then connect the two without doing any of your own editing. The service automatically cuts picture or video highlights to the beat of the music, and even adds other themed artistic elements. You simply register at the site, upload your info, then combine your tacky home movies from your last vacation with a song such as Mad World. Display it in their gallery or export to myspace or other sites of your choosing. They will keep up to 10 muvees active for one year.

Upgrade to a Bumper account for $60.00 a year and get 5 extra styles (for a total of 10.) …”

Entry Date: November 19th, 2006

Ash – your fairy godmother to a free bumper account

Just in case you are wondering who is Ash in our new “Tell Ash about this muvee” feature; I figured that yours truly should first introduce myself. I am Ash, the marketing communications owner for muveeMix.

We believe that kick-ass muvees should be shared with everyone and are eager to spice up our blog with your cool creations. The search is on for muveeStars, so remember to “Tell Ash” the next time you make that muvee and you might just see it featured on the blog. This also sets the fairy godmother to work and you’ll find your account expanded to store 50 muvees and have 5 extra styles to play with!

Till then, may awesome videos be with you!

Entry Date: November 17th, 2006

minor updates to muveeMix

Here is the first technical update post. You can expect to see more such posts as we add features and fixes to make muveeMix a better experience for you. What this week’s update brings:

• First of all, a link to this blog in the main interface so you can find us
• Heavy dieting: we shed over 100KB of file size and muveeMix should now load faster
• We are happy to provide 2 additional music tracks for your muvees: “Chill Out” and “Teen Rock”
• You can now send a specific muvee to your friends (from the player page)
• You can send now a specific muvee to Ash (from the player page). If she likes it, it may become the weekly featured muvee on this blog. (More about that in a future post.)

Entry Date: November 8th, 2006

muveeMix on Mashable

Our review on Mashable, muveeMix Launches - Instant Movie Mixes for Myspace. Pete Cashmore was really quick to grant us our first exposure to the web2.0 community the very day we launched muveeMix. Here’s a snippet of who, what and where we came from.

” muveeMix, which launches today, is a new service for mixing videos on the web and posting them straight to your social networking profile or blog - Friendster, MySpace, Blogger, Multiply, Xanga, LiveJournal and TypePad are among the suggested platforms. The new product comes the Singapore and New York-based video editing company Muvee, who also produce a desktop video mixer.

It’s an interesting tool - you can upload video clips, pictures and music, then wait for muveeMix to work its auto-mixing magic…”