OnlinePhim.net Blog

It’s already November. Man, time sure flies. Daylight saving had ended. We now have a new president-elect (for better or for worse). Before you know it, it’ll be the holiday season and then the year is over. It’s also mean that we are reaching our second anniversary. More on that later. Let’s start with some updates.

About 2 weeks ago, part of our videos are down because one of the video host was doing a major update to their system which brought down the servers for almost a week. Of course, after they updated, our old code didn’t work any more. We were immediately went to work on a workaround. At the moment, a fix was implemented and the videos should work now. At lease, if for Firefox. As for Internet Explorer, because they way they handle code differently, it’s about 50/50. Although we’ll continue to investigate other possible solutions, your best bet for viewing right now is using Firefox. We’ll test on Safari later when we have time.

Any way, thank to our helpful staffs, we are now able to provide you with higher quality videos without chopping them into tiny little pieces. This limited engagement is available while we celebrate our second anniversary. However, because this process is very time consuming, the trial period will end when we start our third year, which is a little before Christmas time. Then, they will be only available to our contributors. Since, the majority of people don’t really care about the quality, or chopped-up videos, this probably will have very little effect on our viewers. Personally, I’m a quality-nut, so I don’t watch anything with low quality any more, but that’s just me.

Since we are always working on adding/removing/editing functions, features … blah blah … if you suddenly find something not working as it should. Then it’s normal. If after a week, and it’s still broken? Then you should send us a message to let one of the staffs know in case we missed it.

Update 1: Safari is working just fine.

Update 2: If you have an unused YouTube account that was registered in early 2007 or earlier, please give us access to it so it can be use in one of the experiments that we’re running. Thank you.

Here’s another good news, bad news, post. Ok, let’s start with the bad news first. Over the last 2 and a half months we’ve been trying to bring back one of our servers. Unfortunately it looks like that it won’t be coming back, and along with it … all the videos that were hosted there. We do not have enough resources to archives every video we posted, so it’s almost impossible to back track all the dead links and update them. As of right now, we’re putting a stop-loss on it and move on. Some will get updated, but most won’t. If anyone wishes to volunteer to help update them, or post future videos, let us know. The staffs, and fellow viewers, would really appreciate it.

Now, the good news. All those 5 - 10 minutes videos should be playing fully, at least for now. Yes, it’s been a long time since that problem arise,. We’ll continue to work on it to find a more permanent solution. But for now, enjoy them while you can.

Edit: Look like the fix only worked for approximately a week before they changed the server settings again. Hopefully some people got some use out of that before it went down.

As always, remember that this site is still pretty much in the beta stage. It means that things are constantly changing, things will be broken, updates will be made … so if you find that the site is not working anymore, down the road, try clearing your browsers’ caches and cookies, reinstall plugins …etc .. all the usual stuffs. The staffs are usually hanging around at the forums for extra help if you need any. Yes, it seems pretty inactive there, but we’re always around.

We have updated the plugin requirements to the current version of flash. For most of you who keep your flash plugin up-to-date, you won’t notice anything different. For people who are using version older than 9,0,115,0 … you will be required to update it before you can continuing viewing the videos on this site.

We are also changing the WMP plugin with a newer Silverlight version. The main reason is that the silverlight version works better cross platform (Firefox, Safari … etc) while the WMP plugin only works well with Internet Explorer.

All these updates are minors, but required for your continuation of your enjoyment of the site. If you can’t update your flash plugin, just try unnstill the old version first before installing the new one.

On a side note, we decided to temporary suspend the “purchase” option. A few times a week, we get questions concerning the purchasing of the original video sources. Even though we don’t really sell anything, we decided to look for sources for you. Unfortunately, we haven’t find any reliable ones yet. Vnnmall was one of the few that have an affiliate option. However, even after sending them a message from the contact form and emailing them directly, they don’t reply. If this is how they do business with affiliates and customers, then it’s not worth it. If anyone find a good, reliable source that you have bought from before … let us know. Other interested viewers will appreciate it.