Happy 2010 everyone!

We launched a new design for the Marcellus Video Platform last night.
For the most part, we’ve made things a little cleaner, added more definition to containers, introduced consistency where it was lacking, and added a touch of soft aesthetics wherever possible.

You’ll see the changes as soon as you log-in to your account, but we’ve included a few screenshots below anyway.
Enjoy!

mvp- The Dashboard

mvp- Upload a new video

mvp- Customize Video player

mvp- Video Library

Good morning,

We just released a new layout for your video management page. You can see the re-designed look by clicking on the “Manage Videos” tab in your admin console.

For the most part, we’ve tried to focus on making the list view more read-able. We have also added in a “Preview” option under each video thumbnail, so you can preview the video without having to click through to the video customization page.

Oh- equally important..we’ve added in the ability to search through your videos as well. You will see the search bar to the right of the navigation tab, on the Manage Videos page.

Good luck, and enjoy! As always, we look forward to your feedback to make Marcellus a more usable and functional service.

We’re adding in support for standard player modes, for folks that feel the need for a view different from the light mode that we currently offer.

The change is simple: on the video customization page, you’ll be able to select “Standard” or “Light” as a pull down menu option for your player.

What does the “Standard” mode look like? Check it out- nice ‘n big.

Watch out for this release next week!

Interesting new addition to the video customization process.

Now, on your video detail page, you can add your *own* custom preview image, which loads in your video player prior to playback.

It’s a one-step process, really: just locate the image on your local computer, and upload it. It’ll automatically fit within the dimensions of your player.

Screenshot below and enjoy. Hope you find this useful!

Good news!

We just added in H.264 support today, and moved away from FLV to MP4 in our choice of container format.

Video quality’s awesome, and some samples available for a short while at:

1) Fantastic Four: http://marcellus.tv/f_four.html
2) Sharks: http://marcellus.tv/shark.html
3) Batman Begins: http://marcellus.tv/batmanbegins.html

Enjoy the videos and stay tuned for more exciting announcements coming up in a couple of weeks!

Exciting news from the Marcellus product team: two new features added this week.

First, we’ve added the ability for the scrubber to be hidden after a few seconds of inactivity(you can specify the number of seconds, of course).

Second, you can also specify the default volume for each player instance when the video loads up.

Screen shot below, and hope you enjoy these additions!

Some publishers need tool-tips for buttons on the player scrubber, and some don’t. So, we’ve added tool-tip support as a player customization feature in your publisher console.

Just click on a video, and on the player customization page that follows, you’ll find a checkbox to enable/disable tooltips. Simple.

Much love to Everett Teague @ Pro Web Communications for the gentle prod.

The Marcellus Video Platform (mvp v1.0) went live over the weekend.
You can now sign up for a trial account directly on the site(http://www.marcellus.tv) and try out the service yourself.

Here are a few screen shots:

1) Video listing: A listing of your entire video library, sortable by viewership, video title(alphabetical), and date.

2) Metadata editing: Easily add/change video metadata like title, keywords and description. Comes in handy when we start making your video content SEO-friendly.

3) Video player customization: Change the look and feel of your video player, including colors for individual player components. Add a custom watermark or logo as well.

4) Video uploads: Upload video files up to 1 GB in size, in most formats (WMV, MPG, AVI, MOV, MP4) for automatic encoding to Flash. Also, view real time information on your used storage vs. total storage capacity.

5) Reports: comprehensive reports on your content usage, video placement footprint(first publishing point only for now), storage and bandwidth usage, and more. All in one simple reports interface with date-based filtering.

Hello,

We’ve made a few changes to our player. The noticeable ones are:

1) Removed anti-aliasing of scrubber items: the play/pause buttons, and the time code display now show up in a crisper form, with no anti-aliasing.

2) Reduced height of scrubber area: the scrubber was originally about 45 pixels high, and we’ve brought that down to about 26 pixels.

3) Better border-fitting: now, the video flushes quite well with the edges of the player, something we were struggling with in the previous version of the player.