Category Archives: Development

YouTube HD Trailers

Posted on by
6

As some of you may have already noticed, we’ve posted a couple YouTube trailers on our site this week (e.g. Donkeys). Many have suggested their inclusion in the past, but I’ve always been against it due to 2 main reasons:

  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.

Found The Culprit!

Posted on by
Reply

After re-enabling my site, I immediately saw our site getting hammered and our CPU usage spike up. A quick look at our access logs revealed that 90% of the load is being generated by XBMC clients. All their queries appear to be search related, so for the time being, I’ve disabled the internal WordPress search engine and switched to using our Google custom search engine.

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(); ?>

Blog Maintenance

Posted on by
4

As some of you may have noticed, our blog was under maintenance for a little over a day. Turns out it was using too much CPU and we were notified that our site would be disabled and told us to come up with a plan on lowering our CPU usage.

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.

Autoplay Feature + Play Latest

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve implemented the autoplay feature, something I’ve been planning to do for sometime. If you append #autoplay to any movie page (e.g. http://www.hd-trailers.net/movie/tangled/#autoplay), it’ll play the latest trailer. In actuality, all trailers and resolutions have their own #hash tag, which you can append and that trailer will automatically start playing when the page is loaded. However, that isn’t currently exposed to users yet. I trying to think of a way to redesign the movie page that’ll allow you to easily share links with the appropriate trailer playing.

You may have also noticed that on all of our index pages (e.g. Latest, Library, etc.) where there are posters, there is now a Play Latest button you can click on the bottom of the poster. All this does is trigger the autoplay feature of the movie page, so playing the latest trailer is only 1 click now instead clicking on the poster, scrolling to the trailers, and clicking on the resolution you want. If you happen to land on the movie page and just want to play the latest trailer, we’ve also added a Play Latest button right above the poster for your convenience.

Currently the autoplay feature defaults to 480p. We’re thinking of a way on how to let users choose their own preferred default resolution.

I’ve only tested this on Firefox 3.6, IE8, and Chrome 8, and they appear to work fine. If you hit into issues with a particular browser, please let us know.

More exciting stuff to come! Look forward to it! And don’t forget to sign up four our newsletter!

Added Blu-Ray Releases To Our Catalog

Posted on by
1

Figured given this is an HD trailers website, people may be interested in HD movies that are being released. Hence our New Blu-Ray Releases section. We are aware that we don’t actually have HD trailers for some of the movies, so we’re redirecting folks to our search page. However, we’re still working on what the best design is. If anyone has suggestions, feel free to post a comment below. Also, if people know where I can locate the HD trailers for the missing movies, please do let us know.

Updated Main Page

Posted on by
2

I’ve been meaning to update the main page for some time. Rather than just displaying only the latest added trailers, I wanted to also display other useful information at a quick glance such as movies opening this week, top box office movies of the past weekend, etc. For those who prefer the previous page, you can still reach it at Latest HD Trailers. I know the overall design needs to be revamped. Maybe I’ll find some time this Christmas break.

Also, we’re about to send out our first newsletter! Be sure to subscribe!

Let me know what you think in the comments!

In-Browser Player Expansion

Posted on by
Reply

One of the things I’ve been meaning to fixed for some time has been when you click on a video link and it exceeds your current window size. That has been fixed now. The in-browser player should only expand till it fills your current window.

I was considering of going full screen in this situation, but Adobe Flash doesn’t allow full screen by default and must be user-initiated. You will still be able go full screen afterwards (if using the JW Player). Given that the whole player is in full view now, you no longer have to scroll to hit the full screen button.

Let me know if you hit into any issues!

Merging Duplicate Movie Entries

Posted on by
3

You may have noticed that once in awhile we have 2 entries for the same movie in our main catalog (e.g. the recent ‘The Green Hornet’ vs ‘Green Hornet’). The reason for that is because different sources uses different movie titles, the most common being adding or dropping ‘The’ from the beginning of a movie title.

I had started working on a mapping system awhile back, but due to time constraints and other priorities, I haven’t able to finish it until now.

I’ve done several sweeps through the trailer library and have mapped all the movies that matched my search criteria. If you see any additional movies that you know is a duplicate, please feel free to contact us and we’ll fix it. Thanks!

Added Page Numbers to Main Catalog

Posted on by
Reply

Many people have told me that the left/right arrows for navigation are hard to discover. I’ve been meaning on trying to find a better way to navigate, but haven’t had much time. However it has come my attention that people who didn’t notice the left/right navigation arrows were using the Trailer Library sorted by date to find the latest trailers that aren’t on the first page. As you may have noticed and as I mentioned in the previous blog post, sorting by date is no longer an option for the Trailer Library. So for the time being I’ve added page #s above the trailer posters, hopefully making it more noticeable on how to navigate our main catalog.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, feel free to leave a comment!

Redesigned the Library View

Posted on by
1

So I finally found some time this weekend and did some work on redesigning the Library view. When it was first put together, I just quickly hacked up some code which would display all the movies on 1 page. Now I’ve split up the movies based on the 1st letter of the movie title. I’ve also fixed the sorting issue when a movie began with the word “The” or some non-alphanumeric character.

For the time being, I’ve disabled the ability to sort by date for the trailer library. I figured our main catalog is already sorted by post date and you also have access to the trailer history from our blog. If there’s enough demand, I may put it back.

Do check it out and provide us with some feedback!

Text view: http://www.hd-trailers.net/Library/
Poster view: http://www.hd-trailers.net/PosterLibrary/