We’re experimenting with a new video discovery tool that allows you to expand your search and branch into various areas of interest.  Enter a search term, and you’ll find search results, related searches, and videos watched by other people who entered the same search. Similarly, watch a video, and you’ll see searches and videos viewed by other people who viewed the same video.

We couldn’t decide between two cool versions of this project, so we thought we’d offer both and let you vote on your favorite! Try it now, and let us know what you think by clicking on the “Feedback” link within each discovery tool page.

Since the early days of Veoh, one of the most common requests we’ve received has been to remove the 5 minute preview for long videos. For the past few months we’ve been working on a new web player to make that happen. But before we release it on Veoh.com, we want to make sure that it works just right, so we need your help. All you need to do is install the small web player application, watch video from our beta page, and let us know what you think.

How do I get started?

1. Visit our Labs web player beta page
2. Click on the prompt in the player area to install the web player
   • In Internet Explorer select the Run button in the pop-up dialog
   • In Firefox select the Save File button and then open the setup file from the Downloads list
3. Close your browser before proceeding with the install
4. After you’ve installed the web player, your browser will re-open to the web player beta page where you can search for videos or explore similar, recommended videos to start watching

Feedback

The more video you watch the more information we have to make sure that there are no bugs or playback problems, so please take some time to watch as much video as possible from the web player beta page. We’d also love to hear what you think. After installing the player, you can click the ‘Feedback’ or ‘Report Problem’ links on the web player beta page to let us know about issues, functionality requests, or other thoughts.

What else?

The web player beta is Windows-only for now. We’re also working on a Mac version…stay tuned. There are more features in the works, so let us know if you have ideas or suggestions.

Thanks for your help!

We’ve been hard at work trying to come up with a fresh new design for our video player, and I think we’ve finally come up with something you guys are going to like! The entire video player got a facelift; everything from the control bar to the loading screen is all shiny and new! The player’s not live yet, so this is your chance to be the first to take it for a test drive and give us some feedback on what you like, what you don’t like, and features which could still be missing!

New Features:

One of the biggest changes to the player (beyond the aesthetics) was the addition of the menu button. The menu allows us to have one common place to store all of the information and tools that help you learn about and share the video you’re watching. Also, by moving all of these things into one container we were able to better let you focus on what’s most important: THE VIDEO! So what are you going to find in this menu screen you ask? Well let me tell you:

Details:

This screen contains all of the information about the video you are currently watching. The title, description, rating, number of views, the name of the user who uploaded it; it’s all here!

Share:

This is the place to go when you want to post the video you’re watching to your blog, your myspace profile, your facebook account, or just about any other site you can think of. You’ll notice a bunch of little icons at the top of the screen, each of these correspond to a specific website where you can easily post the video. So, if you want to post the video to your myspace profile, simply click on the button with the myspace logo, enter your username and password, pick which section you’d like the video to appear in and you’re all set! No longer do you have to waste your time copying embed codes, going off to xyz.com, logging in, going to the edit profile section, etc. We’ve taken care of all of that for you! That being said, if you feel like going old school, or you just want direct access to the embed code or a link to the videos page on veoh.com, don’t worry, we’ve still got you covered. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see two small “copy” boxes. One of them is labeled “Embed code,” and clicking on this will copy the entire embed code for the video to your clipboard, then all you have to do is paste it where you want it. The other box, labeled “Permalink” contains the url to the video’s page on veoh.com. I’m sure you can figure out what to do with this one.

Send:

Ok, so you’ve just finished cleaning up the milk that shot out of your nose while watching the funniest video you’ve ever seen. What’s next? Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock… Pencils down! The correct answer is: head over to the send screen and email that video to everyone you know! The send screen does pretty much what you’d expect. It basically allows you to send the video you’ve just watched to your friends. But everyone has that, and we’re not like everyone else. We’re Veoh! So to make things a bit easier on you we’ve added some new features that allow you to import your friends email addresses from hotmail, gmail, etc! No more having to remember your friend Sarah’s email (by the way, Sarah, socalgrrrrrrl123874562yeeeeeah@hotmail.com is not very easy to remember. You might want to think about changing that..).

Browse:

We all know internet videos are like Frito-Lays: No one can watch just one. Well, you’re in luck! The browse tab will hunt down 12 other videos that we think you’ll like!

Scenes:

I have to admit, this one is pretty cool (I made it, so I should know =P). The scenes screen is like the scenes menu on a DVD. We take snap-shots from various portions of the video and allow you to quickly jump to that point at the click of a button. Please note that there are a few videos which can’t currently support this. If the video you’re watching is one of these, then your scenes may be disabled (they’re grayed out and you can’t click on them). We’re working to make this functionality available on all videos in the near future, so for now please bear with us.

So what do I do now?

GO PLAY! PLEASE! Spend some time playing around with the player, try out all the new features, then leave us a comment, or head on over to the forums ( http://forums.veoh.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3035 ) and let us know what you think We really want to provide you with the best viewing experience possible, so tell us what you want, and you might just get it!

Thanks!

Hi, I’m Sean Coady, Director of Technology here at Veoh. I hope you’ve had a chance to check out our new home page and send us your feedback. We’ve added lots of new features like the News Feed and Personalized Recommendations, and we also put a lot of effort into making the home page load faster so that you can get on to finding and watching the videos that you enjoy. I wanted to share with you some of the behind-the-scene tricks we used to improve the page load time with this latest release.

The best resource we found for analyzing performance bottlenecks was the Yahoo Developer Network’s great set of articles on “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site“. The folks at Yahoo have identified a number of common performance problems encountered on many web sites, along with corresponding solutions to rectify the slowness and improve load time.

If you’re looking for a hard-copy version of these articles, the top 14 best practices are covered in the concise book High Performance Web Sites written by Steve Souders and published by O’Reilly Media. In my opinion this should be required reading for all web developers!

Let’s look at three of the top rules from this book that we applied to the new home page:

• Make fewer HTTP requests
• Gzip Components
• Minify JavaScript

Make fewer HTTP requests

Probably the single most effective thing you can do to improve page load time is reduce the number of components that are downloaded on a page. This includes JS files, CSS files and images. The chapter offers various solutions for how to achieve this but let’s look at one technique we used called CSS Sprites: Instead of downloading dozens of individual graphics on a page, we combined them all into a single large image and used the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment for each graphic. Here’s what Veoh’s CSS sprite for the home page looks like:

Using this sprite, let’s take a look at the CSS we used to show the “PRO” icon from our stylesheet:

.proIcon {
background: transparent url(/images/icons/icons_actions.gif) no-repeat -216px -36px;
width: 27px; height: 15px;
}

You can see how the PRO icon is shown by positioning the image sprite at an offset of -216 pixels to the left and -36 pixels vertically.

We haven’t yet captured all the graphics on the home page, nor applied this technique to other pages, but as you can imagine, we’re busy working on doing that. We’ve seen a noticeable improvement in page load time as a result of this change.

Gzip Components

Starting with HTTP 1.1, browsers can negotiate a document compression format with the server by specifying the Accept-Encoding header in the HTTP request. Typically text documents like HTML pages, CSS files and JS files can be compressed from 50% to as high as 90%, which results in a big savings in the amount of data that needs to be transferred within a request. We configured our Tomcat server with a gzip filter to compress all outgoing text files like HTML, CSS and JS. This change alone reduced the total home page file size by about 25%.

Minify JavaScript

This technique involves removing all the unnecessary characters from JavaScript code to reduce the size of JS files, including all the comments and whitespace. We found a great library called pack:tag to help us with this task. Pack:tag is a JSP-Taglib that minifies and combines resources like JavaScript and CSS files. So not only does it minify the JavaScript files for us but it also consolidates them into a single file, which really helps the “Make fewer HTTP requests” rule above.

This is just a sample of the many changes that we’ve been working on to improve Veoh’s load time. We’ve still got a ways to go and you can expect to see lots of improvements rolling out over the next few weeks. I’ll try to write about some of the other techniques we’ve been using on this blog.

Let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your feedback. And as always, thanks for using Veoh!

What is it?
Veoh Labs is a place for our developers to post unreleased, new, exciting, and generally experimental projects. This will give you a chance to test-drive some of the latest and greatest ideas coming out of the Veoh think-tank and give us some thoughts on what you like and dis-like about each project, as well as letting us hear about your own ideas for making them better!

What can you do to help?
Play with the projects! Spend a little time testing out each project, then leave us a comment and let us know what you think!

Do you have more to say than you can leave in a comment?
Head over to our forums (http://forums.veoh.com/) and speak your mind with other Veoh Users.

Where are all the projects?
Stay tuned, we have a number of projects that are almost ready to be released to Labs, so check back often to see the latest and greatest!

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