Media Factory Product Update

posted by jambrose on 01.06.10

We'd like to share some of our recent product enhancements, some of which you may already be using and some that you may not have noticed:

Main Navigation Re-org

As we continue to add functionality to Media Factory, we are always challenged with where to put things. With this release, we have consolidated a number of settings and configurations into an aptly named "Settings" main nav tab. If you have the appropriate permissions, you will see it at the top right.

In order to make room for the Settings tab, we have renamed MEDIA MANAGER to simply MEDIA.

Comments and Members

We've made a number of improvements to the Community > Comments section of Media Factory.

Moderators now have the ability to edit the comment in place instead of having to visit another page. Also, the commenter is now properly displayed regardless of whether they are a registered user or an anonymous user.

You'll also find the member detail page is more focused on user uploads and comments, with quick links to view, edit and moderate their media.

Translator

It's now much more efficient to have applications in multiple languages. Previously, if you wanted your Media Factory application to be in English and French, you would need to install and maintain two separate applications. With the Translator, all the language information is kept separate from the actual page code. The key benefit is that bug fixes are applied across all versions of the site and changing copy (frequently requested by non-developers) does not require editing HTML.

Check out the video below for a demo of Translator.

External Storage

Filemobile takes your data security and privacy seriously. Our unique platform enables us to provide media management and interactive applications as software-as-a-service, yet allows you to store your media on your infrastructure. This feature is easy to configure and is described in detail in the Media Factory developer docs.

External storage can be configured to send files to your own servers or an Amazon S3 instance. For added security in transit, files can be transferred via SFTP. And as always, we are CDN agnostic and your storage system can act as an origin for all major delivery networks.

The Best Transcoder Gets Better

Here is a quick list of recent improvements on the transcoder:

New build improves transcode time by up to 310%
Custom thumbnails allow you to pick time in video to grab image
Increased default quality for Quicktime
Two-pass encode enabled for H.264 custom profiles
Fixed bug in Ogg Theora - encode video for all HTML5 sites

Cloud-based Redundancy

This week we announced the introduction of a secondary instance of Media Factory, and all the hosted apps contained within. In the event of service degradation at our primary datacenter, the entire system automatically fails over to our cloud-based version on Amazon EC2.

At the moment, the backup instance of Media Factory will be static, meaning no data can be written to the database. The effect of this is that while visitors will be able to browse and view content on your site, they will not be able to upload, comment or rate.

This is the third and certainly largest portion of our system to use Amazon EC2. All of our webcam recorders, and our streaming video services also run on the same virtual infrastructure.

It is our intention to keep using cloud computer services to scale our system. Eventually, the backup Media Factory will be fully functional, allowing us to make it our primary instance along with the transcoder network.

We need your feedback

Our developer network maintains an active forum at http://forums.filemobile.com. We encourage you to browse some of the topics and see some of the challenges and solutions encountered while using Media Factory. There are also sections for product release notes, operational announcements, and feature requests!

Thanks!

Permalink | 27170 views | 1 comments