Greetings All,

We are sending word out that Customer Support will be closed on Monday October 12, 2009.

We will do our best to reply to your inquiries as soon as possible.

Thank you

If you’ve ever played a video in Graboid, you’ve noticed the absence of a progress bar or a rewind button. For streaming videos, there isn’t really a way around this, although if you go into full screen mode, you can sometimes (depending on the speed of your connection) use alt-left arrow and alt-right arrow to jump back or ahead a few seconds. Ctrl-left arrow and ctrl-right arrow jump a bit longer.

You can get much more powerful controls by downloading the video first, then opening up the file using an external video player. We recommend VLC player, which is bundled with Graboid. To use it, go to the file in your completed downloads list, click on it, and then click on the ‘locate’ button. That will open up the Windows folder that contains your video. From there, find the largest file(s) and just double click to play. The names will make it obvious which are which, in the case of multiple files.

Within VLC (or Windows Media Player if you use that), you’ll find full controls for jumping around the video, controlling aspect ratio, fast forward, rewind… have fun.

We increased the amount of content on Graboid yesterday from 200 days to 240 days. This means that the files you want to view will be available on the servers for longer, and total content will go up by 20%. Consider it an early Christmas present.

We’ll have some new cool features coming out early in January. Stay tuned.

Over the past two weeks we’ve been gradually migrating all of our server hardware to a new hosting company, which mostly happened uneventfully. However over the past two days we had some outages in transaction processing and for a few hours on Wednesday, the app itself wasn’t allowing logins. All of this has been resolved and the system now has higher capacity than before, and an improved ability to repair itself when something does go wrong.

Thanks for sticking with us through the transition. Now we’re going to go back to working on making the core application even better. Look for some pretty nifty new features in the coming months.

Our support system was down over the weekend. If you tried contacting us through the contact form or by e-mail on November 15th or 16th, and your message was “bounced back” to you, please re-submit your inquiry here. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

Every once in a while it’s worth reminding everyone what a red X in the search listings really means. A movie gets red X’s when users click the button labeled “It’s broken” after downloading or playing a title. A few things to keep in mind:

In general, if you know what you’re doing and can counter some of these problems, nearly every file on Graboid is playable. If you want a really easy experience, just download files with lots of green checks.

There are a few things that can cause problems while you’re using Graboid, that you’ll kick yourself for when you realize what’s going on. We’re working to improve error reporting so you don’t need the cast of CSI to figure out what’s wrong, but in the meantime…

Watch your hard drive space! You can chew up your available drive space easily when you’re downloading 5 GB at a time. This causes all sort of problems, like files not completing processing, the program not launching, and of course, not being able to play a file.

Make sure nobody else knows your password. It’s amazing how often someone else sneaks a couple of videos without telling you. The most problematic situation is if someone else is downloading using your account and then you try to log on. You won’t be able to get a download going, but everything else will operate normally, so it will seem like a software problem.

Periodically the issue comes up of how to watch videos from Graboid on your TV. Some of the popular suggestions are using a 20 foot VGA cable out of your PC, burning to dvd, or just using your PC as a media centre.

Personally, I use an AppleTV. I download to my PC, use Videora to convert to Apple-compatible mp4, and then it streams from my PC via wifi to my AppleTV to my TV. Once I get it into iTunes on my PC it’s pretty slick. I wish I could skip the step of having to convert to mp4 though.

So what solutions have people found out there for watching on their TV. Or does everyone watch on their computer screens?

We’ve set up a Graboid twitter account just to see if anyone cares. The name (surprise!) is Graboid. Just send a ‘follow Graboid’ message to 21212 on your phone if you have a twitter account already, and then I’ll try to say something interesting from time to time.

To sign up for twitter, just go to http://www.twitter.com

You can go directly to our twitter page at: http://twitter.com/graboid

You may have noticed earlier today some times when our main site was down sporadically. We just went through the first migration of servers to our new hosting company. None of the issues today affected operation of the software. We’ll leave everything alone over the weekend, don’t worry.