New Mobile Site!

I’ve been meaning to bring up a mobile-friendly version of our site for some time. More and more people are accessing our site from smart phones and tablets and now with more and more devices supporting HD screens and having access to high speed LTE internet, it was a no-brainer that we needed a mobile-friendly site.

So I’m happy to introduce to you: m.hd-trailers.net

It’s not fully featured yet, but should be more than enough for browsing and watching HD trailers on your mobile device. If things go well, I’ll start redirecting mobile users from our main site to use our mobile site.

Let us know what you think or if you hit into issues. Enjoy! (^_^x)

Figured Out How New Yahoo! Movies Site Works

The good news: We’ve figured out how the new Yahoo! Movies site works.
The bad news: Not everything is rosy.

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.

New Category: Most Watched Trailers

We’ve added a new category to our homepage: Most Watched Trailers This Week.

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!

New @Netflix

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Just wanted to announce that we’ve added a new page to our site. Now you can see what blu-rays Netflix is releasing this week as well as what’s new to watch instantly! http://www.hd-trailers.net/netflix-new-releases/

Problem Fixed: New Facebook Likes Not Showing Up

For the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that new Facebook likes weren’t showing up on our site. The funny thing was old pages which had likes previously would increment correctly. New pages would register your like, but not reflect that on the page once you refresh. I did some research online, but only a few people were experiencing the issue and no one really had much clue what was happening.

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!

Embed HD trailers on your website!

Now you can embed HD trailers onto your own website!

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!

QuickTime Fallback

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We’ve also altered our video player selection algorithm. Previously if you didn’t have an HTML5 browser capable of playing MP4 video or didn’t have Adobe Flash installed, we would show an error. Now, we also check to see if you have QuickTime installed and if you do, we fallback to QuickTime.

New URLs

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We’ve made some changes to our homepage links (e.g. /TopMovies/ -> /top-movies/). For most people, impact should be minimal. We’ve also redirected the old links to the new ones. If you noticed some broken links or a previous link doesn’t redirect correctly, do leave a comment below with the details.