The biggest difference is the new HD trailers are encoded in MP4 instead of MOV. I actually prefer MP4, but the biggest issue is the quality has severely dropped. We typically encode 1080p @ 10Mbps. The new Yahoo! 1080p MP4 encodes are at 4Mbps, less than half the original quality of the old MOVs. This is almost if not as bad as YouTube encodes, and YouTube encodes aren’t watermarked. It saddens me Yahoo! has taken this path.

Another problem is Yahoo! trailers/clips aren’t always associated with a movie. For example, a new trailer they released yesterday was for Cirkus Columbia. If you tried to search for that movie, it’s not even listed in their database.

We weren’t able to automate posting new Yahoo! trailers that didn’t have a movie associated with it. Those will be done manually for now, which means delays.

As for instructions on how to find the download links for Yahoo! trailers on its new site, I’ll be updating our Download from Yahoo! tutorial when I have some free time. The process is a lot more complicated than before, so it may take some time before I publish it.

Update: I’ve posted a rough draft of the new instructions. If you have any questions regarding the instructions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

For awhile now, I’ve always wanted to display trailers that were popular with our fans. I finally found some time to look into how to call into Google Analytics’ API. Here’s a very good starting point: Google Analytics – Data Feed Query Explorer. After fiddling with the explorer, I got the query that would generate the results I wanted.

The next obstacle appears that I need to authenticate with OAuth in order to execute the query from my webserver. I found this useful tutorial on how to get an OAuth token from Google: Google OAuth for Installed Apps PHP Example. Initially I was getting a weird error that said my site was not registered:

The site “http://hd-trailers.net” has not been registered.

After a quick search, I found the page where I’m suppose to register my website: Manage your domains. Registration was pretty straight forward. For the “Target URL path prefix”, make sure it matches the domain you’ll be requesting the OAuth token from.

After generating the OAuth token and secret, I injected the OAuth token into my request and things worked pretty much immediately.

Hope you enjoy the new category!

Obviously it wasn’t affecting everyone or else you’d have tons of websites complaining. I had sent in a bug report as well as contacted my friend who works at Facebook who forwarded my issue to the appropriate department, but I never heard back.

I’m happy to announce that the problem has been fixed. I took some time this weekend to investigate the issue and found out it was related to the open graph changes I made in the middle of November. It turns out that if you include og:tags, the like button behaves differently. When I removed the og:tags from the site, the likes were incrementing correctly and even showing the previous like count.

After a bit of searching I landed on this page: Open Graph Protocol on Facebook. The real useful thing was the Facebook URL Linter, a debug tool to show you what Facebook sees when it parses your website. It turns out I was missing fb:admins or fb:app_id from my meta properties. After adding the app id (which you can register for one here), things started working again.

Another really useful trick I learned was that you can force Facebook to clear its cache and re-parse your page by using the Facebook URL Linter tool. Sometimes Facebook fails to fetch your thumbnail or if you decide to change the title/description, new people liking your page will still get the old data. But if you run your page through that debug tool, it’ll refresh.

Hope this helps anyone else who’s hitting a similar issue!

You’ll probably notice a new ‘embed’ link on the right of each trailer under the source icon. If you click on it, you’ll get embed code similar to below for each resolution:

<iframe src="http://www.hd-trailers.net/embed/marvel-s-the-avengers/3-trailer-no-1-480p/" width="852px" height="500px"></iframe>

Let us know if you hit into any issues. Any feedback would also be appreciated. Enjoy!

We have accomplished that and have stopped posting new trailers on the blog. The blog will remain as to provide new development news.

If you’re looking for our new RSS feed, please read this post.

I got sick and tired of templates going out of date and having bugs which I needed to fix every time the template got updated. That’s one of the main reasons why I decided to go with Twenty Eleven. For the past 2 years, WordPress has released a new template each year to showcase the new abilities of the WordPress platform. I figured that the default WordPress template would most likely be up to date and have the cool new trinkets that older templates don’t have.

I’ve also been thinking of redesigning our homepage and I really like the header and navigation bar of this template.

Let us know what you think!

• 480p
• 720p
• 1080p
• Trailers Only
• Clips Only

The resolution-based RSS feeds will contain only download links and enclosures of that particular resolution. If that resolution isn’t available, it’ll fallback to the next highest resolution available.

The trailers / clips only RSS feeds are as the name indicates, it’ll contain only trailers or only clips. I know a bunch of you don’t really care about the clips, so the trailers feed should help you filter those out.

I haven’t found a good way to expose these RSS feeds yet, so for the time being they’ll be displayed on this blog post as well as alternative links inside the <head> of our homepage.

Let us know what you think!

JW player recently announced that it now supports HTML5 video, with fallback to flash. In concept, it’s a really cool idea. You define if you want to use HTML5 as default and fallback to Flash or vice versa. I created some test pages, but unfortunately, there still seems to be some issues as I was hitting into different bugs running on different browsers.

I then started searching online on how other people dealt with HTML5 video with Flash fallback. Lots of sites recommend including the Flash <embed> or <object> inside the <video> element, but it turns out only browsers that don’t recognize the video tag would render that. In other words if I provided a mp4 video source, it won’t fallback to Flash in Firefox because Firefox recognizes the <video> tag.

After digging around a bit more, the correct logic in JavaScript appears to be:

if( !!document.createElement('video').canPlayType )
{
    var can_play_type = document.createElement('video').canPlayType('video/mp4');
    var browser_supports_mp4 = can_play_type == 'probably' || can_play_type == 'maybe';
}

Initially I had it to return true to only probably, but Chrome, Safari, and IE all returned ‘maybe’ instead of probably. I wonder if I included an audio codec, the return value would be different. Only Firefox returned an empty string which is the correct response if a browser doesn’t support the given codec. The problem with this is that IE also returns maybe, but it can’t seem to actually play trailers from Yahoo! or MovieFone.

In the midst of researching, I landed on VideoJS, and remember Derek had mentioned about it. It’s very similar to JW Player, but backed by the open source community. So I started looking into it and doing a test page. It pretty much worked right out of the box. I did make a couple tweaks here and there to get it to behave the way I want. Looking at it’s logic, it pretty much did the same thing I suggested above.

One of the tweaks we added was in the event neither HTML5 video or Flash was available, we would display the following error:

Given that it had the same logic as I did, that also meant the IE issue was there, which meant I had to special case Internet Explorer, and make it always use Flash.

There has been another issue I’ve been trying to deal with and that is it’s practically impossible to escape from full screen mode in Chrome. If you missed the initial flash that says to exit full screen mode, hit F11 (or ⌘⇧F in Mac), you’re pretty much stuck. Hitting esc won’t work. It doesn’t seem to use the custom skin which has the toggle full screen mode key. When I first hit this issue, I ended giving up and quitting the app. The next time, I found opening a new tab forces the video exit full screen mode.

So if you’re using Chrome or Safari, let us know what you think of the new HTML5 video player.

New RSS Feed: http://feeds.hd-trailers.net/hd-trailers

You also have the option of following us on Facebook and Twitter for new trailer announcements.

Image courtesy of Isaac’s COM125

Previously we used the blog to post HD clips and trailers from other sources, but with the most recent set of updates we’ve made, it’s rendered all movie trailer blog postings as duplicates.

The new feed location is at: http://feeds.hd-trailers.net/hd-trailers

The formatting of the new feed should be pretty much identical. If you hit into issues, please let us know.

Our blog will remain as a source of development news afterwards.

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to contact us.

We’ll post a final update on 11/19.

So for the longest time, I’ve tried to avoid posting YouTube videos because there wasn’t a simple and easy solution to download them. Sure there were a bunch of browser add-ons and extensions that one can use, but I don’t consider installing an extension simple and easy.

However, I finally gave in and began to include YouTube videos, while also including a link to KeepVid. But KeepVid was horrible, requiring you to use Java and who knows what other crap they install on your machine, but there just wasn’t a better solution at that time.

There’s also a bunch of smart Javascript bookmarklets that reveal the video download links, but I couldn’t easily expose them since you have run the script after loading the YouTube page first.

@boxofficeBUZ suggested I check out File2HD.com and it was awesome. The interface was exactly what I was looking for, but it didn’t include the HD versions (480p/720p/1080p) of the videos, which is the main purpose of this site.

I did some more searching and ended up with ClipConverter.cc. It was elegant and simple to use. Provide it with the YouTube url and it’ll give you the option to download or choose from 11 different formats to convert it to (mp3, aac, wma, m4a, ogg, mp4, 3pg, avi, mpg, wmv, flv).

Enjoy!

I tried a similar search on Google’s main search engine, but the thumbnails didn’t show, so I’m guessing it’s something they’re experimenting on custom search and may or may not bring to their main search engine in the future.

At first I thought Google had some deeper integration with WordPress, since the results only seemed to show thumbnails for my blog results. But I’ve noticed a small amount of pages on our main site also had a thumbnail images (as the 1st search result above shows).

As you probably noticed, some of those images are obviously wrong and the purpose of this post is to see if anyone knows what Google is keying off of or if we can provide better guidance as to what the thumbnail image should be. The rest of the internet seems to refer to the image_src link tag for thumbnail guidance, but Google doesn’t appear to be using that.

<link rel="image_src" href="http://static.hd-trailers.net/images/the-darkest-hour-8f0-4aa2fcd932500-poster.jpg" />

If anyone has any idea, I’m all ears!

Update: Found the answer: Custom Search Help: Specify thumbnails

For anyone that’s been monitoring Yahoo’s High Definition Trailers Page, you’ve probably noticed they’ve really been slacking off, only updating once or twice a week, while new HD trailers come out everyday.

I’ve decided to go a different route and monitor their recently added trailers page instead and this should provide quicker updates to new trailer releases.

Another good thing that came out of this is now the main catalog will also include HD clips from Yahoo!, something I had been planning to do for some time.

Enjoy!

1. The quality tends to be lower due to the way YouTube does compression
2. There isn’t an easy way for us to provide you with a download link

We can fix reason #2 by downloading the trailers ourselves and hosting it, but because of reason #1, we prefer to wait for official releases with higher quality. However, we have come to realize that certain HD trailers will only be on YouTube. With that in mind and wanting our site to be the central hub for all movie HD trailers, we came to a decision to include them.

Update: To make our intentions a bit clearer, the only YouTube trailers we’ll be posting are for trailers we cannot find a higher quality for. Secondly, we won’t stop posting trailers from Apple, Yahoo, etc. This will only be in addition to what we’re currently doing.

Unfortunately we can’t provide direct download links to YouTube videos, but we have provided a link to KeepVid, which will provide you with direct download links. It’s a bit annoying when you get that Java prompt, but I notice even if you click NO, the download links will still be provided.

There are also other browser extensions/add-ons and download utilities that one can use which will make downloading YouTube videos easier. I’ll probably be writing up a tutorial on how to download from YouTube sometime later. I’m also looking into getting JavaScript to download the video you’re watching.

One might argue why anyone would come here to search for YouTube trailers. Our reply would be our target audience isn’t really searching for that trailer, but instead is browsing our website checking out new trailers for movies they’ve never heard of.

We won’t be posting these YouTube trailers on our blog, but if there’s enough demand, we might reconsider. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please do leave them below. We’d love to hear from you.

Can someone who works on the HD-Trailers.net plug-in for XBMC or if you know someone who does, please get in touch with us? Our email can be found on our contact page.

I’ve gone ahead and reverted all the things I disabled.

I also found out the Lightword Theme doesn’t actually have a 404 page, and it was returning a 200 even when no page was found. Apparently all you have to do is create a 404.php in the theme folder and WordPress would use that. So I quickly whipped one out using their single.php as a template:

<?php header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); ?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content-body">
<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) { yoast_breadcrumb('<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>'); } ?>

<h2><?php _e('Not Found','lightword'); ?></h2>
<p><?php _e("Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.","lightword"); ?></p>

</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Our blog will be running with a bunch of features disabled while we investigate how to lower our CPU usage. We have some ideas on how to do this, but the gist of it is WordPress turns out to be a major CPU hog and DreamHost has told us we needed lower our CPU usage. Turns out our blog was using ~15000 CP minutes per day. For comparison, our main catalog library is only using ~300 CP minutes a day.

Our main catalog services 3x the # of visitors a day more than our blog, yet use only 2% of the CPU that our WordPress blog is using.

We already had Hyper Cache and we only had a small set of plug-ins enabled . I have been searching and going through tons of suggestions on how to lower the CPU usage. A couple things we did:

• Confirmed that our MYSQL DB had the correct caching enabled
• Verfied settings in Hyper Cache
• Installed WP-Optimize and optimized the DBs
• Disabled new comments from being posted (Akismet was catching 5000+ spams a month)
• Disabled WordPress.com Stats plug-in
• Disabled Twitter Tools plug-in
• Disabled Cufón
• Enabled mod_pagespeed
• Removed recent comments from our side bar
• Trying out different lightweight themes (our old theme was making 30-40 queries per page)

If you noticed any issues, please do let us know.