Media Mill News

Later today, there will be a new Media Mill release that adds a ton of new features. This has been in beta for ages, as we waited for a few pieces to come together. Here's a partial list of what to expect - the links go to videos demonstrating the features:

• Multiple Quality Levels in Flash Player
• Direct YouTube submission
• Direct VideoANT integration (bi-directional)
• Customizable Flash player
• Ability to flag video as progressive (advanced feature)
• Revised projects display - thumbnails and 'more info' link
• Improved sharing notification
• Support for FLV source videos
• Better corrupt file detection
• Revised podcast feeds with detailed file type information
• Improved consistency about http versus https serving
• Better handling of source files with special characters in the name
• Navigation box stays fixed while scrolling

Plus lots of minor tweaks and bug fixes.

So, what's still on the todo list?

• H.264 flash integration
• H.264 streaming
• Revised Help interface
• Demux mpeg-2 (maybe, possibly, perhaps...)
• Migrate flash player to actionscript3
• Modules for submission to third parties
• More flash options
• Autodetect interlaced files
• And whatever else comes up...

Posted by Colin McFadden at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently we sent out our retention policy, which basically says that after you leave the University, you get 60 days of complete access, after which we prevent you from uploading new content and remove your source files (without touching your derivatives). Obviously we'd love to keep everything forever, but it's just not possible. The bulk of the content on Media Mill is stuff that doesn't necessarily gain additional value by having the originals stored, and the costs are substantial.

Anyways, there was some confusion from the email - we have no intention of actually billing folks for the storage space they use. We only mentioned it because we wanted you to know how generous CLA-OIT is.

Posted by Colin McFadden at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Media Mill went offline around 6:30am on Sunday, August 10th. Service was restored around 1:45pm. This was due to another power failure at the WBOB data center. For more information on University service outages, you can always visit the OIT system status page.

Posted by Colin McFadden at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)