If you’re having trouble logging in, press cancel and then login again, without quitting. All servers are operating normally.

As if having a regular version and a beta 0.97 version weren’t confusing enough, we now have a 64 bit beta version. For the past six months or so, anyone with Vista 64-bit has had to use our old beta software (version 0.97) because 1.3 doesn’t work with that OS.

A few days ago we launched a beta 1.3x that operates on Vista 64-bit machines and early results are positive. If you’re one of those users on the beta, you can get the new version here. Let us know what you think. Soon we should have just one version of Graboid and life as we know it will be just a little bit simpler.

Although the real solution is to simply keep downtime to a minimum, we’ve implemented a new status window to let people know when there is a server problem. You’ll see this window on the login screen, as opposed to having to check the blog. But you should still read the blog! There is interesting stuff in there.

Graboid’s video playback engine is quite sophisticated, but there isn’t an obvious users guide to all the functionality. It’s why we created the ‘Tips and Tricks’ forum where you can read up on everything from how to cycle audio tracks to how to burn DVDs.

Hotkeys work when you’re in full screen mode with Graboid, whether streaming or playing a downloaded file. A couple of the most useful hotkeys are ‘L’, which cycles the audio track, and ‘A’ which cycles aspect ratio. Anytime you find a file with an American flag, that isn’t in english, is because the default sound track isn’t in english. In that case, you can almost always cycle to an alternate track that will be in english.

You can even jump back and forth when playing video by using alt-left arrow or alt-right arrow, shift-left and shift - right do a slightly shorter jump. ctrl-left and ctrl-right do a longer jump.

Our planned maintenance is complete as of 11:30am. All systems are operating normally. Thanks for being patient.

Our servers are down for planned maintenance today from 9am to 12pm. Users can download the app and sign up for an account, but the application itself won’t operate until 12pm. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We’ll be doing server transitions to our new hosting provider all this week. There will be service interruptions as a result, but they’ll generally be short and scheduled for early morning periods when load is at a minimum. I’ll post here with the details.

We’ll be taking the application off line tomorrow (Tuesday) morning from 9am to noon while we do some prep work. Watch here for updates.

I heard an announcement this morning that HBO is coming to Canada. I have to say ABOUT TIME, as there hasn’t been any way to get shows like Entourage and Dexter at their first run times. Of course there’s no doubt it’ll be part of some new package as a way to ding us for even more $ than we’re already spending. For those of you in the States, you have to be happy that we’re finally producing some decent shows up here and exporting them (along with our oil) down there. Like Flashpoint, or Corner Gas. Check them out, eh?

We were having a problem processing transactions on one of our servers, but it’s been fixed as of 1:30pm and we’re now working to retroactively fix all affected accounts. Sorry for the problem, and thanks for being patient.

We had load issues last weekend, and we’ve adjusted our traffic distribution to allow for the higher load this weekend. Next week we begin testing in our new hardware environment and we won’t be cringing as we watch the graphs climb in the future.

And something else to look forward to… once we’re in our new high-capacity home, we’ll get back to work on some great new features, including bringing back user comments and some other stuff that’s top-secret for now.

Have a great weekend.

We’re going to start more actively using this blog, both for general musings on movie and TV, and for conveying what’s going on behind the scenes at Graboid. We’ll continue to use the blog for server status updates of course, and those updates will be under the category ’servers’.

We put self-diagnosis capability into the Graboid client with the release of version 1.3 last month, but the fact that it tells you the servers are having problems doesn’t help if you can’t log in. So we’ll be putting in a feature soon that gives you a quick update on status during the launch process.

We’re also going to re-enable comments on the blog.