Dear Transloaders,
it is now possible to replay an assembly notification by pressing a button on the website.
If you have configured a notify_url for your assembly's params, you will see a button "Retry Notification" on an assembly's detail page. This is helpful for debugging and for the cases where the notification went wrong because you did not return a 200 status code or anything.
Enjoy!
Kind regards Tim
@tim_kos
Dear Transloaders,
We are happy to announce a new member of the robot family: The YouTube store robot!
This guy is still pretty simple - it can only export videos to your YouTube user account and make them available there. You can provide a title, description, category and tags, and everything will work auto-magically. However, in the future he might be capable of doing more.
This robot is still a young boy (read: beta) and has had little real world testing so far. As all other robots, the youtube/store robot is 100% covered by automated tests but there could still be something wrong with it.
Please bear with us a little in case you discover bugs.
Here is the documentation: http://transloadit.com/docs/youtube-store
Please all give a warm welcome to the youtube/store robot :)
Kind regards, Tim
PS: The robot's avatar will follow shortly.
Pricing is hard, and we have gotten a lot of complaints about the complexity of cost-prediction with our current model over time. We have also found that we need to introduce a small base fee in order to provide our service to smaller companies without losing money.
So today we are announcing a new pricing that is hopefully going to simplify things for you as a customer, and for us as a business.
Here is what we are changing:
Effective immediately, you are being switched to a "Transition Plan" that is $0 / per month, includes 0 GB, and every additional GB is charged at $3 / GB.
If your last bill was below $80, you will save up to $5 / month.
If your last bill was above $80, you should probably switch to one of the new plans (see below) immediately to save money.
You can stay on the Transition plan until March 1. Unless you manually selected a new plan, you will be switched to our $19 / month plan at that point if you were using more than 100 MB in February.
Our new plans are as follows:
(Note: Storage and Thumbnail GB count as 10%, audio encoding as 25% of their actual usage.)
Unless you were paying less than $19 per month before, these new plans are generally going to reduce your monthly service costs. You can upgrade and downgrade any time.
If you had a custom plan with us in the past, nothing changes for you.
Pricing changes are notoriously tricky to get right, and we know this one is no exception and we've probably missed a case or two.
So if you have any problem with our new pricing, just open a support ticket and we will do whatever it takes to make you happy!
We have talked to a lot of our customers before making this change, but we can never learn enough about our customers, so feel free to provide us with any feedback you may have.
Felix Geisendörfer, co-founder
Dear Transloadit users,
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our first unofficial NodeJS SDK.
Geoff Wilson was so kind to put it together. He has run it in production for over one month now without problems.
It supports our signature algorithmn and is also wrapped into an npm module. If you plan to integrate Transloadit with NodeJS you should definitely check it out.
For further detail, please read the project page here: Transloadit NodeJS SDK.
Kudos to Geoff for this!
Kind regards
Tim
Dear Transloadit customers,
on behalf of the entire team I would like to wish you a happy new year, health, happiness, luck, love and success! We will continue to strive to offer you the best uploading and transcoding service!
To start things off for this year, I would like to announce a small change to our jQuery plugin. Up until now the jQuery plugin would still kick in and show the upload modal even though your users did not select a file at all.
This is now resolved. To not break backwards compatibility this functionality has been encapsulated into a parameter called processZeroFiles which has a default value of false.
You can read more about this on the jQuery plugin documentation page.
Stay tuned, we'll have more announcements soon!
Kind regards,
Tim
Dear Transloadit users,
today I'd like to announce a few changes to our assembly index page that some customers could already see over the past few days and that are now rolled out to everybody.
The page is now a full screen table and features more information for you to review, for example:
In addition to that, we also added a nice new filter system that allows you to filter by type, date, time, redirect url, notify url, error message and id. This will help tremendously with debugging assemblies. The pagination design also received its share of design love - or so we think. :)
Here is a preview image.
We also finished a database migration over the weekend, which causes the assemblies index pages to load even quicker now. Please notice that we had no service down times caused by the database migration.
Please let us know what you think.
Kind regards, Tim
Dear Transloadit users,
we are happy to announce the release of our new /file/filter robot that allows you to filter incoming files based on all of the file's meta data, and more.
To use it you set up conditions that would either accept files or ignore files. You can specify if you want the whole assembly to stop if a file is declined or if the file should just be silently ignored and not passed onto the next assembly steps. You can also provide your own error message that your users would see if one of their files is declined.
To give you an idea, please think of the new possibilities that were impossible or very hard to do before:
The API should be straightforward. If you need to handle very complex scenarios you can chain several /file/filter assembly steps together.
Please check out the documentation and the demos and let us know what you think!
Kind regards, Tim
Dear Transloadit users,
We are happy to announce the official release of our /audio/encode robot! Having been battle-tested in production by quite a few customers for several months now it should greatly help with your audio needs. It is priced at 25% of the video encode robot and starts at $1 per GB. As always, the more gigabytes you use, the less you pay per gigabyte.
As of now the robot only comes with an mp3 preset. We are planning to extend this list soon, though. However, to also easily support OGG, MP2, etc. we allow you to supply custom ffmpeg parameters.
To see how everything works, please check the robot's docs page and the demo section.
Here is a small update on what we have also been working on recently:
We hope you enjoy the new features and the stuff we have in the pipeline. Please let us know what you think.
Kind regards, Tim
Some customers have already used it behind the scenes, but now it is officially released: our sftp robot. It makes storing files on your own servers a breeze and costs just the same as the /s3/store robot. Please check out its documentation here and feel free to comment on it.
This doesn't end here though. We have also put a new homepage live that introduces our service in a better way, lists some customers, provides a small preview of how the integration works and features a great graphic from SoftFacade that shows our robots at work.
I'd like to dig a little deeper into the process of how that graphic came together, because it was an interesting process and I think the result is awesome.
First off we contacted SoftFacade, told them who we are and what we do. We told them we wanted a nice branding graphic that shows what we do in a simple format. We showed them a picture of a crane moving containers to picture what we are doing with files, since we imagined a big shipping facility to be shown on our final graphic:
Then, even before the first sketch, we had the idea of a big assembly line (think of how cars are built) with robots on the side doing work. And SoftFacade quickly came up with the first sketch:
We didn't like it overall so much, because the robots didn't look like the ones on our website. They looked more like beetles. :> But the general idea was picked up very well and we knew this was going in the right direction!
We asked SoftFacade to refine the robots a little and also add a video stream onto the table for the robots to work on. See how much of an improvement the second sketch was:
We asked to make the iPhone (stands for any smartphone there) on the left more apparent, add a database barrel in the top right and that the robot making the image bigger should make it smaller. In fact the phone there was meant as a browser, but that got fixed up later. This is what we then got:
We still did not really like the phone/browser on the left and gave some feedback on that. The final sketch was this:
We loved that and got really excited! We knew what work they pulled off for SimpleGeo and others. Their pixel perfect HD images are legendary and if the final sketch of our little robots looked so great how much would the HD version blow us away then?
The first colored HD version shipped two weeks later:
Fantastic! Loved it. We asked for some color changes as we didn't like the green. Also the robots' mouths should be white and we wanted an audio jack in there signifying that we do audio as well. Some alignments and fix ups later we go this:
Marvelous detail! Notice the engraving on the front side of the table. :> We asked again to fine tune the browser, because we thought the blue map in the background was weird. We also wanted to add an upload progress indication to it:
Great! The only real change we wanted there was to change the progress indication to look more like the one we are using in our jQuery plugin.
Only two hours later we got our final result:
Thank you SoftFacade for this great graphic! We also made some T-shirts with it already. : )
And also thanks everybody who helped provide feedback on the homepage during its development! I'd like to especially mention here Garret Woodworth, Peter Gerard, Josh Crowder, Tony McAllie and Felix Clack. Thank you very much for your support!
Please comment below and tell us if you like our new homepage. :)
Kind regards, Tim
Things have been nothing less than crazy for the last 2 months. We have gone from 300.000 uploads to almost 1.000.000. During peaks, we are now fully utilizing 20 machines (160 cores), and we are still continuing to grow quickly.
Unfortunately this also meant that a lot of our time went into scaling the service, rather than building shiny new things. As of today we have caught up with some of the most pressing issues, allowing us to allocate time towards other improvements again.
The first of those are some small improvements for our assembly detail page. Rather than dumping a huge JSON object at the bottom of every page, we are now rendering all aspects of an assembly in a useful way.
This includes listing all uploads and results in a table like this:
With detailed information showing up in a modal overlay:
While we were at it, we also improved the information we provide in case there was an error while executing the assembly:
To make this change even sweeter, we migrated to a faster database server once again, after an EC2 failure caused us to move to a weaker fail-over machine for a while. As opposed to our last announced downtime which lasted 4 minutes, we were now able to perform the switch without any downtime whatsoever : ).
The assembly list page now also shows the used redirect_url and notify_url.
Anyway, let us know how you like the changes!
--fg
