Factory515.com is now TagTrigger!

We're phasing out Factory515.com and making the move to TagTrigger.com. It is a complete self-serve product. Upload clips, tag them, and embed them. Here's a sample:

Uploads!

Long time, no post... :) Been busy here working on so many things. The latest addition to the Factory 515 platform is uploads. If you are registered as a Factory Worker, you can upload to 48.tv from factory515.com.

If you would like upload privileges without registering as factory worker, email us. We can't just throw open the upload doors wide open because 48.tv is only for 48 Hour Films.

We'll have more upload options in the near future, but I wanted to get this news out as soon as possible.

neglected blog... :(

The 515.blog has been very neglected lately. Totally my fault. But it is time to open the doors of communication again! We'd love to hear from you, so please contact us here through comments or use the contact form on 48.tv.

We are busy building out the new companion site for our .TV sites, called "Nucleo" which will be available on factory515.com. We are closing in on the end of the private beta and will most likely open it up to the public by the end of the month.

On the .TV side, we've released a new version that fixes a number of bugs and adds a few features. One of the biggest new features we've added is the ability to watch ANY network's films without logging in! This has been requested for some time and now that we are more publicly 'launched', we've removed this requirement and people can now more freely watch whatever they want.

Another exciting thing happening is the first ever Second Life 48 Hour film contest is now airing. Tonight at 8:15, the Second Life films will all show. Be sure to check them out.

Interim Release V 2.5 B61

Well, we just couldn't wait to do another major release. Too many cool new features and key bug fixes.



Some of the biggest things are under the hood, but their immediate implications are worth noting as well.



* Anytime you do something on the site that generates a list of shows, we now use, what is called internally, a Unified List Renderer. This gives us a consistant UI element that offers ease of change, ease of customization for new networks, and ease of ability to add features... like.....

* Active thumbnails. When you roll over clip's thumbnails in any of the ULR cells, the video clip's thumbnail will begin to play.



* Significantly reduced load time.



* Clip reviews. You can now write reviews for films on the factory 515 platform. On the bottom of the clip info window (you can get there by clicking on [info] in any of the lists or the picture of the slate to the left of the player), there is a place for you to add your review.

While you are adding a review, if you worked on the film, go ahead and list your self as a cast or crew member. You'll need to define yourself as either in front of or behind the camera talent in your PROfile in My Account.

Factory what?

So yeah -- it has been super quiet here. We've been moving our corporate headquarters and while our development team is relatively small, our parent company, brainbox is not. We have a TON of stuff and a very serious network. I've had to play network admin in our move and work with my senior IT guy to get our new facility up and running.

Here's the new joint.

Ok - so 3.0 is running a little late. We'll have something up soon. We're eeking little features & fixes in here and there, so don't be surprised if something new pops up... that's kind of how we do things.

The rest of this year is destined to be busy. We hope to have 3 new major 'releases' before too far into '08.

Introducing Yehia Shouman, Part [2/2]

...continuing from our previous conversation with the '515 front end team lead, Yehia Shouman.

BD: We've done a lot of things in '515 that are really different then other video-based websites.

What are some of your favorite technical achievements that we have made on this project?

Yehia: There's a lot of features in this project that really make it very unique, I will try to highlight some of these in terms of whether they are obvious to the user or not Some of the visible features:
1) The Schedule Concept: Handling time-based playback of videos is a painful process, but it was worth all the pain.
2) Video Preview: Previewing the video before you see it.
3) Autocomplete Search Field; If you remember the name of the movie, you could start typing the first letters and it will auto complete for you. I am emotionally attached to this feature!
4) Realtime Validation in Email To A Friend form
5) Ability to seek through video; this is because we stream video rather than progressively download it like how alot of other websites started.
6) The content quality; we display hi-rez at film frame rates.

Some of the underneath-the-skin features:
1) Broken Video Links Automatic Reporting: The application uses 2 video sources through rtmp. If the CDN failed to deliver the file in a configurable amount of time it will try with another server (And post a message to the owner of the movie with the problem)
2) Centric Configuration File/CSS-Based and Centric place that handles Remoting Calls
3) All sub-modules are completely deattachable from main and connected to it using configurable items

BD: What are you most excited about that we are currently working on, technically?

Yehia: It has to be the new ... [snip... cut by BD... you'll have to stay tuned for this one. :)]

Also, the automatic errors reporting; this is a really robust application. If some error occurs it will automatically report itself to the administrator with information about the user's machine, call error, time and params! That's even better than an OS that sometimes fail to send errors!

BD: What, to you, makes '515 different from the multitude of other video-based sites?

Yehia: There's a lot of things that makes me favor the '515 platform over other sites;The schedule and the autocomplete search field!
The schedule concept is awesome! Also, look at the video quality! Not alot of other websites deliver the same quality as '515 does!

BD: What have you learned working on this project?

Yehia: Persistence, thinking like the user, tolerance is a virtue, being positive about my mistakes (Be Responsible about them and then fix them). Sky is the limit when you think so never imitate!
On the technical level, I have learned a lot. Both, Bill Davidson and Nick Panagopulous are great thinkers, they come up with very challenging and brilliant ideas, that usually requires an additional stretch of legs with a few more steps.

BD: Is there anything else you would like to add?
YS: The future of this project is huge, the amount of extensibility and granularity this platform is makes it very open to a lot of different applications in different life fields. We are also building with a lot of faith, joy and care.

BD: Thanks a lot, Yehia.
YS: Thank you Bill for this opportunity. I am definitely going to put a lot of input in this blog! Also we will demonstrate a lot of our new features here!

We will be hearing much more from Yehia in the future. He is the most vocal of our Cairo team and he loves talking about technology. And we love hearing from him.

quiet...

We've been hard at work to finalize 3.0 and we have some great new features coming... One thing I am excited about is film reviews. Be a critic and review everyone else's films (or your own, if you got issues...)

We hope you'll enjoy it. We're hoping to wrap this puppy up and get it our in the next week or two.