March 12, 2009

Transcode Videos To Multiple Formats

Hey guys. This week I’ve been working on allowing to give you some transcoding options. This mainly came about because I wanted to allow people to view videos off Twitvid on their mobile.

To change your transcoding settings, just sign in, click “settings” on the profile you want. Then click “video upload settings”. You will see two boxes, one with FLV and one with 3GP. All you have to do is choose what you want and click save.

So, how do you get to the different formats?

Well, when you upload a video to Embedit, you are given an url that looks a bit like this

http://embedit.me/videos/embed/7qduce

If you queried that url, the xml you would get back would be for the FLV. FLV is default.

To get the 3gp version, just add this to the end of the url

http://embedit.me/videos/embed/7qduce?format=3gp

Lovely!

I think the next plan is to totally redo the documentation as I think it could be a lot clearer.

On other notes, I have upgraded the server to 1GB RAM so it’s super speedy.

Enjoy

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March 4, 2009
I hate beta signups where you have to wait for an email, but I thought that this approach may have been best for Embedit, just so I could monitor its usage (as the speed and stability of the API is pretty important here). Embedit’s been going for about a month now, and I’m pretty happy with how its performing. So I’ve decided to let anyone sign up. It’s still in “beta” stage, so you can still grab your free, 500mb/week, 10 profiles, account ;)

I hate beta signups where you have to wait for an email, but I thought that this approach may have been best for Embedit, just so I could monitor its usage (as the speed and stability of the API is pretty important here).

Embedit’s been going for about a month now, and I’m pretty happy with how its performing. So I’ve decided to let anyone sign up. It’s still in “beta” stage, so you can still grab your free, 500mb/week, 10 profiles, account ;)

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March 2, 2009

API Change

You can now use the normal Url embed call when grabbing the embed code for your uploaded videos.

So instead of:

You can now:

This mainly means that you can allow your users to upload video/images or embed urls on the same resource, with out have to say

if an_uploaded_video do this,

else_if a_url do this

The documentation is here

NOTE - The old api call will still work.

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February 27, 2009
http://twitvid.in

This is the first app I’ve created that uses Embedit’s video uploading, enjoy!

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February 26, 2009

[OS] Want Embedit In Your OS Project?

Want to use Embedit in your Ruby OS software, or know a piece of OS software that you would love to be using Embedit, but don’t have enough time or the know how?Email me at reddavis at gmail… you know the rest. Or leave a comment below with a link to the project.

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[Feature] Video Uploading

videojpg

Yes thats correct. It’s taken its time but it is finally here. You can now upload videos through Embedits API, we’ll transcode it for you and then spit it back at you. If you are currently a member of Embedit, just login, go to one of your sites settings and you will see Video Upload Settings where you can set the upload limit (currently limited to 50mb, if anyone needs more just email me and I’ll be more than happy to raise it) and in Error Messages you can set the error messages that get spat back if there’s any problems.

To show how quickly and easy it is to get something up and running using Embedit last night I a quick video version of TwitPic called Twitvid.in.

This is how Twitvid uses Embedit:

User uploads a video (along with their twitter credentials), if the users twitter credentials are correct Twitvid then sends the video to Embedit.

If Embedit says the video is valid, a tweet is sent from the users account. (if you are asking your users to upload large files I recommend doing some validation on your end so that your users don’t have to wait for a long time.

In the tweet is an url, something a bit like http://twitvid.in/fi0ko2. When someone visits the page they will either see a picture saying the video is still transcoding or will see the awesomely transcoded video.

What is Embedit Doing?

When a video is given to Embedit, it firstly check that it is actually a video. The video then goes into a queue. Embedit sends back some some XML with an url (or error messages if there was an error). When this url is queried you will be either given XML containing info of the video, or XML containing info for a “Currently Transcoding” image.

From the queue, the video is uploaded to S3, it then joins the encoder queue. In this queue the video basically gets transcoded and then the transcoded version is put back onto S3.

A nice little feature is that if the queue becomes too long a new uploader or transcoder is spawned (but this still needs some bugs fixing).

I’m hoping to start tidying the app itself up and make it more user friendly, you should hopefully be able to set your own “currently transcoding” images.

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Welcome

Hey, welcome to the Embedit.me blog. I’ll post news, tips, tricks and anything else to do with Embedit. Enjoy

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