Dailymotion Blog

After some weeks of testing, a new upload page is now online!

The new process does on one page what used to be done on two, so now you can upload your video and edit it in the same page, at the same time. To put a video on the site, select the file, click “Upload”, and then add, change, and save the video metadata while the video is being sent. The progress bar will indicate when the upload is complete. Once the file is on the platform, it will just take few minutes to encode the video before you can watch, share, or embed it.

In addition to this interface improvement, we have totally revamped the advanced video edit page - check out the screenshot below.

Another feature we’ve cooked up is the option to set a “Next Video”, which will be proposed in a small overlay at the top of the player a few seconds before the end of the video. All you have to do is define the Dailymotion URL of the video you want to be shown. Other changes include the ability to send your video to several groups simultaneously, and a dramatic increase to the filesize limit - from 150 MB to a maximum of 4 GB per video - for all users.

We hope you enjoy these changes. Please email any comments to feedback@dailymotion.com to let us know what you think!

Imagine The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy meets Flight of the Concords..and you’re halfway there.

Dailymotion has teamed up with web comedy guru Hayden Black to bring you a sci-fi musical comedy starring Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek’s original Uhura.

Nichols introduced the trailer premiere at the San Diego Comic-Con Masquerade Ball. Nichelle was also on hand to sign autographs for her many fans at the Wizard booth at Comic-Con.

The pilot episode of The Cabonauts will also star James Leary from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Miracle Laurie from Dollhouse. It airs this fall only on Dailymotion!

Check out creator Hayden Black’s recap of Comic-Con here!

Los Angeles, Calif. — Nichelle Nichols, known for her role as Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek, has joined the cast of Hayden Black’s musical comedy Sci-Fi series “The Cabonauts.” The new web-only series is launching in an exclusive partnership with Dailymotion,  the world’s second largest web video entertainment site.   Erin Gray, who starred in “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”, and her firm Heroes for Hire are overseeing casting.  Interviews with Ms. Nichols on her role in The Cabonauts can be seen here: Nichelle Nichols interview #1

A music comedy Sci-Fi series set in a space cab, “The Cabonauts” will follow characters as they take various passengers to their intergalactic destinations.

Created by Evil Global Corp. and written by its principal Hayden Black, creator and star of the award-winning web comedy series “Goodnight Burbank” and “Abigail’s Teen Diary,” the series’ first season  will be filmed in HD and have their first run exclusively on Dailymotion.

“When I read the beautifully written, comical, futuristic script for ‘The Cabonauts,’ I thought that whoever wrote it was crazy and I couldn’t wait to be a part of it,” commented Ms. Nichols. “I love the sheer nonsense of it – we’re in a seemingly normal situation then suddenly break out in crazy song. It’s such fun and so smart, with elements in it that you have not seen before on screen, and I think it can’t miss.”

“We see The Cabonauts as a  breakthrough in Web comedy and we are absolutely thrilled to see Nichelle Nichols not only agree, but join the cast,” said Joy Marcus, General Manager of Dailymotion US. “Nichelle’s fans will now join our strong base of of comedy, music and sci-fi lovers-to make  The Cabonauts a huge success.”

“Getting Nichelle on board is the thrill of a lifetime. She’s a gorgeously talented, brilliantly gifted actress who elevates the show to a whole new level,” said Hayden Black, creator of “The Cabonauts.” We think her fans from her Star Trek days and beyond will love her character in The Cabonauts.”

As you might know, last Thursday at the end of the morning, our data center suffered a power outage. This outage caused the complete inavailability of our site for a few minutes, followed by serious disruptions over several hours that rendered the service almost, if not completely, unusable. This service interruption is historic for Dailymotion, which hasn’t experienced an interruption of this scale since its launch in 2005. This is why we think we owe you an explanation…but be warned, it’s rather technical.

We’ll start by explaining how the power is treated in a data center such as ours. Electricity is brought in by two separate EDF (Electricité de France) circuits, then passed through some transformers. In case of an outage, batteries keep things running while onsite generators start up (the site has a bit more than 24 hours of fuel in reserve). As it exits the transformers, the current is “cleaned” then stored in a battery back-up system. This back-up, separated into two groups of 3, furnish two independent electrical supplies. According to our hoster, Equinix, human error caused the cutoff of all 6 back-ups at once, triggering a total blackout for a good minute - the time it takes for the back-ups to restart.

And there you have the cause.

Due to this (violent) cutoff, our network equipment and our servers sustained some damage. The core of the network normalized in about 12 minutes, but only superficially. In reality, certain machines came back online with a mix of different configurations, more or less out-of-date. The cause of this mix remains rather blurry for the moment.

One of the consequences of this configuration mix-up was a breakdown in multicast routing between our different frontal web servers, which kept them from synchronizing to correctly share workloads. Imagine it as if the traffic lights of a busy intersection changed color at random, and not as part of a bigger system.

Meanwhile, the databases needed a certain amount of time to verify their integrity. The storage servers, likewise, took a good hour to confirm that the video files had not been damaged. To top it off, a number of circuit breakers couldn’t support the simultaneous restart of all the servers, and crashed. Thus we had to wait for the help of Equinix, which was working hard elsewhere, to get them back up.

And there you have the result.

Here’s a timeline:
· 11:16am - Power outage.
· 11:17am - Power restored, service unavailable.
· 11:30am - The network core goes back up, some videos are available in external players.
· 12:15pm - Part of the platform becomes available, but the site is in read-only mode and difficult to access.
· 12:45pm - The final circuit breakers are switched back on, the last machines restart.
· 1:00pm - The greater part of the platform is available, but the site remains read-only and difficult to access. A few non-critical machines fail to restart. Traffic begins to ramp back up.
· 1:30pm - The storage servers are available again.
· 2:30pm - The database become available in write mode.
· 3:00pm - The communication between our frontal servers is reestablished, the site is fully accessible in read and write mode. A few services remain perturbed (webcam upload, search, encoding).
· 6:00pm - All services fully operational again.

To conclude, we would like to offer our apologies for any inconvenience caused. We assure you that we will do everything we can, in the near future, to improve the quality of service and the availability of the site.

This morning an electrical outage at a major data center outside of Paris took Dailymotion and a number of large French websites out of commission. We apologize for the inconvenience, and are working to get back online as fast as possible.

Thanks for understanding. We’ll see you again soon!

The latest version of Firefox has just been released with native support of the new HTML video tag. A few weeks ago, Dailymotion launched an experimental web site to test and promote open video formats and this new tag while Firefox 3.5 was still in beta.

Today, we once again are assisting Mozilla in the launch of Firefox 3.5, by serving their “Thank You” video on What’s New page, which users will see this after installation of the browser’s latest iteration.

Thanks to a recommendation from the Mozilla technical team, we are now serving the Ogg videos with new HTTP headers in order to facilitate the display of the video in the browser. We now have all the infrastructure necessary to encode, serve and display more than 410,000 videos encoded in Ogg with the <video> tag. At the recent Open Video Conference in New York, many attendees from various organizations met with us to help us continue to improve the new service for our users.

And finally, a worldwide advertising campaign just started yesterday on Dailymotion in support of Firefox 3.5. We hope that it will encourage you to download a more modern, effective and secure browser for surfing web sites like Dailymotion.