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  • VMIX SDK v3 Release: Upload for Android and Solving the Size vs. Quality Issue

    Ian Miller 10:46 am on August 31, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     
    Another month and another strong release of the VMIX Mobile Video SDK, chock-full of features we hope will save you time deploying your mobile applications.

    This month, we decided to focus on bringing parity to the Android side of things, and to solve a challenge many developers that we’ve talked to are facing: video quality vs. streaming.
     

    Android Video Upload

    Last month, we introduced capabilities for our iOS SDK that make it easy to allow iPhone users to capture and upload videos directly from their phones to your media libraries. This month, we ported that same functionality over to our Android SDK.

    While we weren’t able to squeeze in some of the niceties, like upload-progress bars, the core functionality is there. We’ve seen a lot of interest in Android development over the months and, while many of you have deployed an iOS application or two, you’ve been stumped when it comes to porting your apps over to Android.

    This month, we felt your pain by walking in your shoes! The devices out there running Android are varied and come in different sizes, resolutions and versions of the software. And those versions tripped us up in a few spots. Specifically, we ran into instability when rotating our demo application in Android 2.2 (Froyo). The solution to these issues was simple: lock the device in portrait mode. While this isn’t the ideal solution, it did allow us to get a much more stable product out for this month and stay on schedule. Application rotation is important in some contexts, but for many (likely, most) applications, users will be content to use the application in portrait mode.
     

    Do I Choose Quality or File Size? The Answer? You Can Have Both!

    For the second piece of this release, we tackled a persistent challenge developers face: finding a middle ground between quality and small file size for mobile video delivery.

    With Apple and AT&T setting strict standards for how much data can go over the cellular network (and the speculation that other carriers will likely follow AT&T’s lead) developers are fretting a lot more about how to conform to manufacturer and carrier requirements so that their apps are not yanked from stores or censured in any way.

    To solve this, we employed the same KISS strategy we did with the Android rotation issues. Our solution is to serve different quality video formats depending on the type of data network the device is using at time of play.

    VMIX can encode to a wide variety of bitrates, dimensions and formats without breaking a sweat. And the SDK now includes two format IDs in the configuration files (for both iOS and Android).

    So when a device is using a Wi-Fi network at time of play, we serve a higher-quality file; if the device only has cellular network connectivity, we serve an appropriate, lower-end format.

    Benefits? Two biggies:

    1. Mobile users are guaranteed to get the best playback experience for their connection.
    2. And developers can be sure their applications will use Wi-Fi whenever possible. At the same time, developers can stop worrying about consuming too much bandwidth when their apps play video on cellular networks.

    If your account isn’t already set up to encode to different formats, let your Client Services Manager know and they’ll help you set this up. Once your account is set to encode a couple different formats, your app built on the VMIX SDK will automatically switch users to a lower-quality video as they move from Wi-Fi to the cell network.

    And, of course, it goes without saying that our powerful encoders still keep that lower-quality video very watchable!

    To find out more about the latest version
    of our SDK, read on.

     
  • VMIX Adds Wi-Fi Switching and Android Upload to Mobile Video SDK

    Bill Curci 9:30 pm on August 30, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     

    Today we’re releasing the third version of the VMIX Mobile Video SDK. Our baby is practically a teenager!

    The release in a nutshell …

    • We’ve added a switching capability that allows applications built on our SDK to automatically serve the best video formats for Wi-Fi or cellular-network connections. Why is this a big deal? It delivers higher-quality video to users on Wi-Fi and saves bandwidth usage for users on cellular networks.
    • The upload capabilities we added for iPhone in the last release? We’ve extended that to the Android environment, enabling developers to build capture and ingestion into their applications very easily.

    For details on these exciting new features, please read on below.

     


     

    VMIX Adds Wi-Fi Switching Capability to Mobile Video SDK

    Helps Developers Meet Requirements for Usage on Cellular Networks

     
    SAN DIEGO, Calif. – August 31, 2010 – VMIX (www.vmix.com), a leading online video platform provider, today announced the addition of Wi-Fi switching to its mobile video SDK for iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

    This new capability will enable video apps built on the VMIX platform to use faster Wi-Fi connections when available to deliver higher-quality video, reverting to cellular delivery when users move out of the Wi-Fi network area.

    “We see this as a simple way to optimize the everyday video experience for mobile users,” said Greg Kostello, Co-Founder and CTO at VMIX. “The video application automatically detects whether the mobile device is using a cellular or Wi-Fi connection at play time and serves the appropriate video format, reducing usage on users’ cellular networks.”

    Kostello added that the Wi-Fi switching built into VMIX’s mobile video SDK also helps developers comply with device-manufacturer and carrier requirements for media usage on cellular networks.

    “Mobile developers can be sure their applications will use Wi-Fi whenever available, and play video at the highest possible resolution and quality. At the same time, developers don’t need to worry about consuming monthly bandwidth if a user isn’t near Wi-Fi.”

    Today’s release, part of the company’s ongoing updates to its mobile development kit, also adds a video-upload capability for Android devices—upload for iOS-based devices is already available in the VMIX SDK.

    “We’re making it as easy to add upload and sharing to mobile apps as it is has been to include delivery and playback,” said Kostello, adding that VMIX is the choice for developers building carrier-class video apps.

    “Our capacity to manage over twenty million video files, with more than a million new videos uploaded through our system every month, demonstrates our capacity to scale to meet the needs of mobile developers.”

    For more information on VMIX’s Mobile Video SDK and the company’s Android, iPad and iPhone demo applications, visit: http://www.vmix.com/mobile-sdk.php

     

    About VMIX

    VMIX Media Inc., (www.vmix.com) is a leading provider of online video and media management solutions. The company is the trusted partner of news, entertainment and enterprise companies including NASA, ESPN, Raycom Media, Penguin Books, The McClatchy Company, Toyota-Scion, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and Post Newsweek Television Stations.

    ###

    For more information, contact:

    VMIX
    Bill Curci, 858-792-8649 x169
    bill@vmix.com 

     
  • Inside VMIX: Hula Hoops, Toilet Rolls and a Flying Dog - Oh My!

    Julian Santos III 5:10 pm on August 26, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     
    Last month, we had our annual VMIX summer picnic at a local park.

    The San Diego summer sunshine refused to come out, but we didn’t let grey skies dampen our fun. Good times were had by all, including my dog Charger!

    We even had a relay race that had us hoop-jumping, egg-balancing, toilet-paper mummifying and balloon-popping for some good-old team-building silliness.

    I edited a video montage of some of the highlights we managed to capture using a Flip cam, along with my trusty slow-mo digi-cam. The video features the amazing sounds of VMIX Web Developer, Jason, aka Goddamn Electric Bill! Enjoy!



     
     
  • Startup Weekend San Diego

    Ian Miller 12:28 pm on August 25, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     

    This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a really great event called Startup Weekend San Diego.

    The Startup Weekend concept has been around a few years and happens in many cities around the world.

    This, however, was San Diego’s first Startup Weekend. The event took place at the HIVE, which has become San Diego’s co-working headquarters, and the flow of the event went like this: Friday night, attendees came together and pitches were made (by attendees) for about 18 different projects. After the pitches, idea-owners were given cups and everyone was given two tickets. Attendees then voted for the ideas they liked best by putting tickets in the cups.

    The top 6 ideas went on to form teams, which were completely self-selected, so some teams were larger than others, some with more tech resources, others with more business minds. Then, over the next two days, teams worked furiously on their projects–the hope being they’d have a clean enough product and presentation by end-of-day Sunday that when they presented to the panel of angels and VC representatives, they would win! The prize for the event was free incorporation services provided by a local law firm–a value of up to $2,000.

    Though I didn’t stay the entire weekend, I was there for most of the day Saturday and the judging on Sunday. I found it exciting to start from scratch with an enthusiastic team and have something concrete by the end of the weekend. The project I chose to work on selected the name HootOnU.com. The basic premise of HootOnU was to provide a platform for people to complain, easily and in a structured fashion. The platform would have the ability to generate detailed reports about who had complained about an issue, where and why they were annoyed, and what, if anything, they’d like to see changed.

    HootOnU ended up winning the competition and the team has now gone on to incorporate and pursue the idea further. (More …)

     
  • Sneak Preview: Modelinia iPad App in Apple's App Store

    Sue Walsh 3:58 pm on August 24, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

    Psst! Pass it on! Our new iPad app, developed for the fashion, beauty and lifestyle site Modelinia, is now available in the Apple App Store.

    The video-gallery app delivers rich content, including interviews with supermodels, unique runway footage and personalized beauty advice. Modelinia fans can learn how to stay “bikini fit” all year round, glean beauty tips from Molly Sims, and get a tour of Heidi Klum’s childhood photo album—from Heidi Klum!

    What we find exciting about the app is that it was built using the VMIX Mobile Video SDK. Meaning that you, too, have the tools to extend your brand quickly and easily by adding video for your mobile audience.

    That, and the fact that Modelinia’s content is great and it looks even better on the iPad!

    We’ll be talking more about the Modelinia app in weeks to come. In the mean time, for more information on downloading and building apps using our mobile video SDK visit: http://www.vmix.com/mobile-sdk.php.

     
  • Engineering Team Scaling Up

    Lei Pan 9:32 am on August 12, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     

    VMIX is looking to expand its engineering team by a software engineer or two.

    What are we looking for?

    • Developers with a passion for solving complex, interesting problems across our infrastructure.
    • You will be instrumental in designing features and addressing critical issues across a distributed platform that supports tens of millions of daily requests.
    • You need to have strong analytical skills, the flexibility and aptitude to zoom in to fine-grained detail, and the agility to zoom right back out and up the stack.
    • You must be able to produce coherent, organized code, and feel comfortable working on a complicated codebase with high levels of abstraction.

    Interested in the finer details and requirements? Read on >

     
  • Drifting: Not as Easy as it Looks

    Steve Watanabe 4:34 pm on August 4, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     
    Scion Racing - Drifting
     

    I attended college in Colorado, which meant winter time, which meant snow. And for me, snow meant fun times in empty parking lots, burning up first gear in my front-wheel-drive student econobox.

    As soon as the snow hit the ground, I’d head to the field-house parking lot with a bunch of buddies and start doing donuts or racing around an imaginary track. We’d end up with “parking-brake elbow” after a couple of hours of what is now known as drifting.

    Scion has devoted an entire area of their Racing site to drifting, and it is truly amazing how drivers there are able to throw out the tails of their vehicles on a dry road. The snow in Colorado made it more than easy for us to drift but I wouldn’t have attempted anything like it in the summer months. I would have thought it pretty much impossible.

    Not so. Scion’s Drift section does a great job detailing the ins and outs of drifting. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift may not be your favorite movie but you can’t help but be at least a bit intrigued watching Tanner Foust leaving a black-drift tattoo all the way up Mulholland Drive—he burns a set of tires, I’m sure, within the two-mile course.
     


     

    The site features drift drivers, their cars and the competitions they enter. You can even ask questions using the Ask the Driver feature:  Hey Tanner, how do I drift my family minivan when the parking brake’s a pedal on the floor?

    And of course, the video on the site is incredible—there really is no other way to demonstrate how intense the sport has become.

    Check out the rest of the Scion Racing site as well: http://www.scionracing.com

    Drive safely! 

     
  • Decoupling the Presentation Layer and Data Services with Android Services

    Lei Pan 9:47 am on July 30, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     
    This week we’re very happy to be open sourcing our first version of an SDK for Android development, along with a demo video-gallery application using that SDK.

    Similar to the mobile development kit for iPad and iPhone, released a couple months back, the goal for this release was to provide the core set of objects and components required to power video applications on the Android platform, and to make it easy for developers to use by decoupling the presentation layer from the data services.

    This decoupling allows the developer to focus on the UI design and interaction of the application, without having to worry about the details of accessing data from web services, document parsing, request optimization, error handling, and so on. We leverage powerful Android components to achieve this decoupling, the most important of which is probably the Android Service.

    A Service is an application component that runs in the background. It can be used to perform long-running operations without interacting with the user, or supply functionality of one application to other applications. The SDK introduces 3 services that extend the base Service; GetCollectionsService, GetCollectionMediasService and PlayVideoService. These Services handle their own thread management to provide non-UI blocking interactions with the VMIX APIs, and parse the response into declared VMIX data structures for UI consumption.

    When the operation is completed, the Services use Intents, an inter-application message-passing framework, to alert the UI that the data is now available for presentation. The UI — or with Android specifically, the Activity — that wishes to leverage one of these Services would simply start the Service, and filter on the Intent that announces the availability of data or completion of the operation. Receiving the proper Intent would lead to an update of the presentation.

    In addition to providing functionality to the Activity that started them, these Services can also be made available to other applications. This is achieved by directly binding Activities to Services using ServiceConnection. Once the binding is established, the public functionality of these Services is available to be accessed by other application Activities.

    You can see the inner workings of these Services and how they’re utilized by downloading the source for the Android SDK and VMIX Demo Application (code named Moonlight). We would love to answer questions and hear any feedback you may have!
     

     
  • VMIX Adds Android Support to Mobile Video SDK

    Bill Curci 2:00 am on July 29, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     

    Development on the VMIX Mobile Video SDK continues to steam ahead — today we’re launching the full second version of the SDK!

    The release in a nutshell …

    • The Mobile Video SDK now supports app development for Google Android-based devices. This includes release of an Android Demo App that developers can use to build on and demonstrate video-powered app development for the Android platform.
    • New upload capabilities have been added for iPhone that allows mobile end users to upload video to a VMIX account and developers to engage audiences more effectively.

    For details on the release, please read on below!
     


    VMIX Adds Android Support to Mobile Video SDK

    Open-source Offering Expedites Android, iPad and iPhone App Development

     
    SAN DIEGO, Calif. – July 29, 2010 – VMIX (www.vmix.com), the leading online video platform provider, today announced the extension of its open-source Mobile Video SDK to support application development for Google Android-based devices.

    The VMIX Mobile Video SDK speeds development for Android devices, as well as for Apple’s iPad and iPhone, using an open-source library that extends media-framework APIs in the native device SDKs.

    VMIX also announced the addition of video-upload functionality for its iPhone development kit, and will extend this new feature to the Android platform by August.

    “We continue to add components to our mobile SDK that make it very easy for app developers to harness the power of video quickly,” said Greg Kostello, Co-founder and CTO at VMIX.

    “We now offer SDK tools and templates for Android, iPhone and iPad, and we’ll continue rolling out features for each of these device types, based on feedback and needs from our development community.”

    Initial Android support in the VMIX SDK includes the ability to pull and display video thumbnails, titles and descriptions, as well as stream video over Wi-Fi and wireless networks. Developers can present videos individually or organized by category in a video-gallery style application.

    “As with for iPhone and iPad, we’re including an Android video-gallery sample app, which lets developers substitute their clients’ own videos and preferences in minutes,” said Lei Pan, Senior Director of Engineering at VMIX. “This demonstrates how easily organizations can add dynamic content to the apps they create for the Android user community.”

    Pan added that the new video-upload capability for iPhone represents significant value for developers. “Mobile upload functions make managing, publishing and sharing video so much easier and give developers the means to engage audiences more actively with video.”

    For more information on VMIX’s Mobile Video SDK and the Android, iPad and iPhone demo applications, visit: http://www.vmix.com/mobile-sdk.php.

    About VMIX

    VMIX Media Inc., (www.vmix.com) is a leading provider of online video and media management solutions. The company is the trusted partner of news, entertainment and enterprise companies including NASA, ESPN, Raycom Media, Penguin Books, The McClatchy Company, Toyota-Scion, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and Post Newsweek Television Stations.

    ###

    For more information, contact:

    VMIX
    Bill Curci, 858-792-8649 x169
    bill@vmix.com

     
  • NASA Streamlines Online Video Using the VMIX Platform

    Bill Curci 2:00 am on July 27, 2010 | 0 Comments Comment

     

    We’re excited to announce that VMIX is now powering all the video on NASA’s website, http://www.nasa.gov.

    The agency’s goal was to streamline video management and unify all video content on their flagship site.

    Highlights of the integration?

    • NASA support staff across numerous divisions and locations now have a single upload, management and publication tool for online video.
    • Classifying, finding and publishing media has been simplified using standardized tags, genres and video playlists.
    • NASA has also adopted our Dynamic Streaming encode and delivery service, resulting in higher encode and playback quality.

    Streamlined workflow, manageable content and a superior user experience. We’d call that a win!

    Kudos to the joint NASA-eTouch-VMIX implementation team who have done an incredible job!

    For details, read on below.
     


    NASA Streamlines Online Video Using the VMIX Platform

    Simplifies Workflow and Boosts the Power of Video on nasa.gov

     
    SAN DIEGO, Calif. – July 27, 2010 – VMIX (www.vmix.com), a leading online video platform provider, today announced that NASA is using the VMIX online video platform to launch and power multimedia content on their flagship http://www.nasa.gov website.

    Working with eTouch Systems, Prime Contractors for NASA’s public web portal, VMIX’s online video solution was selected to better manage video content submitted by divisions across the Agency, simplify workflow for employees located throughout the nation, and enhance the encode and playback quality of video published on their site.

    “This is so much easier than what we previously provided NASA,” said David Valliere, eTouch CEO.  NASA Public Affairs Office offers the public media related to NASA’s mission programs, centers and mission-support offices. “With the entire Agency submitting video in different formats, and being sent to us using different tools, our video workflow had become labor intensive, unwieldy and definitely not suited to the growth of video that NASA expects in coming years.”

    Valliere said the VMIX platform’s upload and media-management tools streamlined http://www.nasa.gov’s video workflow almost immediately. “NASA contributors now all use a single tool to upload media to a central account, which is a big win. The flexibility of the VMIX platform, though, still allows their staff to customize the way they work to fit their work styles.” Valliere added that NASA’s staff across the US are very pleased with how much easier it is now to submit and manage media.

    VMIX EVP and Co-founder Terry Ash said clients often select VMIX because the platform simplifies their work. “Our uploader makes it easy to classify media consistently, using the same descriptive tags and genres. NASA is also adding videos to standard playlists, which publish automatically to various sections of their site. This is a huge time saver, and helps them upload and launch videos in minutes.”

    Ash added that NASA has also optimized the quality of video on their site by adopting VMIX’s adaptive bit-rate streaming service. “Adaptive streaming delivers the best possible video quality on the fly—and delivering the best user experience is ultimately what it is all about, because that is what keeps people watching and coming back for more.”

    About VMIX

    VMIX Media Inc., (www.vmix.com) is a leading provider of online video and media management solutions. The company is the trusted partner of news, entertainment and enterprise companies including Penguin Books, Tribune Company, The McClatchy Company, Toyota-Scion, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and Post Newsweek Television Stations.

    About eTouch Systems

    eTouch Systems delivers enterprise-class Web 2.0 solutions and services to help business and organizations of any size unlock the value of the collective intelligence, insights, and creativity of the entire organization and turn it into competitive advantage. They offer comprehensive and powerful portfolio of products, solutions and services that makes it easy for employees, customers, and partners to contribute, collaborate, and communicate with impact.

    ###

    For more information, contact:

    VMIX
    Bill Curci, 858-792-8649 x169
    bill@vmix.com

     
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