beta v2: what's coming, and when

[VReel-Eoin]

Discuss this in chat - no account required

Alright, a lot of questions have been asked lately, regarding beta v2. We've all taken a step back, and a good look over VReel - and where we need to go with it.

Firstly, a rough overview of what's coming:

• Premium Accounts
• New video system - h.264 support & up to 8gb uploads
• Community system
• Image & Audio upload

Starting off with Premium Accounts:

There's four different levels of accounts. The first we're going to look at is un-registered accounts. Ala, a user which has not signed up with a username and password.

These users will now only be permitted to watch one video per day on VReel, and cannot access user profiles, images, or audio. Registering an account will still remain completely free.

Registered accounts will still retain all their old user rights, along with a range of new options in Beta v2. To sum up, this is what will be available:

Free Account:
1gb upload limit
1 Image upload (avatar)
max 2 minute wait before watching a video (pre-roll advertisement)
Can view videos up to 2gb in size
Banner, Interstitial, Pre-roll and pop-up adverts
Full Profile/Community features

Gold Account:
$7/month
4GB upload limit
No pop-up adverts
Image gallery (unlimited image storage - 5meg max filesize per image)
Option to set a video as "Private" (does not appear on search, requires either an invitation or a user-set password to watch video)
Name displayed in gold, user icon turns gold
Can view all videos
10GB Embed-ready bandwidth

Platinum Account:
$20/month
8.5gb upload limit
No advertisements at all
Image gallery (unlimited image storage - 5meg max filesize per image)
Music gallery (unlimited mp3 storage - 30meg max filesize per track)
Private media options (video, images and music which require either an invite, or a password to view)
custom user icon
custom name colour
100GB Embed-ready bandwidth

This confirms that platinum accounts will avail of 100GB of bandwidth per month to embed VReel content on their own websites

In short - for free accounts, it's VReel as you knew it, but with pre-roll video advertisements. Please note that these advertisements will not all be 2 minutes long - it will depend entirely on the size, and lenght of the content you're going to watch. In some cases, there will be no advertisements before watching a video.

To celebrate the launch of our Beta v2 (and to keep you all occupied), Moriella is hosting a group of competitions entitled the "VReel Olympics" - You can check it out here, and get in with the chance to win free Gold and Platinum accounts!

Moving on from there, our New video system:

Firstly, as you read previously, platinum accounts can now upload videos as large as 8gb. Gold accounts may upload up to 2gb. Following a month of monitoring this, we will see what we can do about upping Free accounts to 2gb uploads.

Now, down to business - h.264.
The DivX codec has been floored by h.264 lately - which allows for much, much better quality, while also giving a much better file compression size. This will allow for a much, much better viewing experience for everyone.

In order to facilitate this, we have been developing our own webplayer for the past while. This player is being developed around the VLC engine - one of the most proven video players on the market. This player has already been proven to be more stable, and faster than any other player on the market - including DivX's brand webplayer.

Development on this as you can imagine is quite lenghty - but we've been working throughout the nights to ensure we can have a stable version ready for beta v2 launch.

We're expecting to have our first working stable model ready for internal testing tonight - we might just give some of you a peek at it. If all goes well, we're going to work on multi-platform support (Windows, Mac and Linux), and of course get it aestethicly polished up for release. Our player WILL include popular functions such as a "desktop dimmer" esque feature, and the pop-out player.

First and foremost though, we're going to ensure 100% stability, and get coversion as fast and lossless as possible.

We know some of you will be worried about us moving away from the DivX player - but we wouldn't do this unless we were 100% positive that we can provide a better experience. Having our own player will also allow us to continue internal development, and create improvements based around what you believe would make great additions to our player.

I can also confirm that we will NOT reconvert the following:
DivX5.x encoded video
DivX6.x encoded video
XviD1.x encoded video
h.264 encoded video

These videos will not be touched by our converters at all, and will be completely lossless after upload.

Going on from there, let's talk about the long awaited Community System:

The "Community System" has been very long in the works, and it's about time I let you all know what's going to happen with this.

Firstly, having a community will be a lot like having your own "Channel" on VReel. You get to select your own administrators and mods, and can set up your own community based around members which join your group. Members will be able to share videos through this system, based on your own approval if needs be.

It's important to us that the community system is "all yours" - you'll have total control over everything which goes on here. You'll be able to create your own themes and skin the community to your own needs, along with having a private forum system available to members of your community.

We'll have group toplist functions, along with a good search engine to find groups that might interest you. Once we complete the launch of Beta v2, we're going to focus on adding more and more features to this - think of it like running your own social network. This will be in place for Beta v2.

And finally, we come to Image & Audio support:
For the first period of Beta v2, only paid members will be able to avail of Image and Audio uploads. Over the course of the first 2 weeks, we're going to see how much usage these functions get, and see how we can roll it out to all Free accounts.

Image & Audio support will DEFINITELY be available to all free accounts - we've just gotta see how it's being used before setting any limitations on it.

Misc:
We'll also have our social bookmarking system up and running for Beta v2 - this will allow you to submit your videos, audio, and images to popular social bookmarks such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit etc etc.

VReel's latest kids story/conspiracy theory has been that Beta v2 has been a "cover up", due to VReel being unable to pay a substantial leecher bill from our launch. While it's true that the attack onslaught from leech websites ran up a massive bill (think mid-range six digits), it's definitely not causing any shutdown.

It's to be expected that a website tearing in close to half a million unique visitors per day and serving up HD content was going to run up a very large bill - while we weren't prepared for it happening this quick, we've got our bases covered. Only around 30% of our bill has been generated from VReel users - the vast majority has been generated by Leech websites, which continued to embed our content and attack our servers with html scrapes when the only financially viable thing for us to do was to temporarily switch embedding off. The only SAFE thing for us to do while we develop Beta v2 is to switch off videos entirely.

We dont want to leave you all high and dry in a months time with a bunch of new features and no way to showcase them to you - our new webplayer and community features in particular will blow you away. Right now we're looking at Beta v2 being 100% completed towards the end of the month - aroundabouts the 28th or 29th. We're going to see what we can do about having Beta v1 with additional features and leech protection back up and running before this.

If we have to stay quiet until the end of the month to ensure our survival, then that's an option we'll have to consider. A bunch of other small home-run VReel clones have had a surge of traffic since we closed our doors temporarily - and we apologise to the webmasters dealing with this surge. Many are reporting losses of thousands of dollars per day.

HD Video portals are extremely difficult to sustain - bandwidth is a very, very expensive thing in this business. We'll be happy to work with any webmasters in need of help from our downtime - just send me on a PM.


I'll keep you all in touch as we move along through this development period - we're going to set up a few competitions during the downtime, and throw a couple of gold and platinum accounts up for grabs for the winners. If you want to take part, sign up!

If you've any questions about this whatsoever, please post them here, or alternatively - PM them on to Myself, Ferdia, or Moriella.
Along with the VReel Olympics, we're also looking for uses for our currently dormant powerhouse servers while we continue development. You can head on over here to request a multiplayer server for the game of your choice.

Thanks for sticking with us guys, we're almost there.

[Sinful]

Holy mother of lord, you just found my holy grail

I'm deffinitly willing to pay 7/a month for that.
When i read that you would support h264, my jaw litteraly dropped, of joy
I take it this is the mkv container right?

Vreel, you got my support, i believe everything will be amazing once its finished, keep up the nice work Vreel team!

<3

[Andols]

This looks awsome.
Keep upp the good work

[johni]

question: i pay for a premium account, you have my adress, name, etc. what happens if i upload some copyrighted stuff?

[VReel-Ferdia]

Originally Posted by johni

question: i pay for a premium account, you have my adress, name, etc. what happens if i upload some copyrighted stuff?

Same thing as ever, if the copyright holder contacts us it gets dropped.

[VReel-Ferdia]

Originally Posted by Sinful

Holy mother of lord, you just found my holy grail

I'm deffinitly willing to pay 7/a month for that.
When i read that you would support h264, my jaw litteraly dropped, of joy
I take it this is the mkv container right?

Vreel, you got my support, i believe everything will be amazing once its finished, keep up the nice work Vreel team!

<3

H264 is a standalone codec, MKV (Matroska) is a container that holds codecs together.

[Moriella]

I've allready had inquiries about payment methods. Paypal of course, credit card transfers as well. We are also looking at using SMS payment. I also imagine we will allow mailing of payment using certified funds of some sort.

[BlackShark]

It's all big improvements, except this :

All other countries: Zango requirement to view videos

This is a huge setback for me which prevents me from uploading and even recommanding the site to friends.

I hope you'll be able to find advetisers in the rest of the world or global advertisers so you can get rid of zango as soon as possible.
Until then, i can't use vreel.

I also have a question about VLC... i think it's GPL software so i think if you build on top of it you'll have to release the source code and other websites will also be able to use the technology you developped. Are you really going to do it ?

[kwaad]

Originally Posted by Vreel-Ferdia

Same thing as ever, if the copyright holder contacts us it gets dropped.

Now I have a question about this.
Will you store the personally identifiable information?

[frost]

Wow , this sounds great..I will definitely start off with a gold acct for the first few months to see how things go and then move to the platinum and hopefully by then you will have a triple platinum where i can get sick options lol...Great job Vreel, you always seem to strive for excellence..