Joomla 2.5 was released yesterday.

As of today (25th January) our Nightly Builds support Joomla 2.5.

If you don't want to upgrade, and you are using the last official release you can easily get your installation working with Joomla 2.5.

As most webmasters using hwdVideoShare in Joomla 1.7 know, a bug introduced in Joomla since version 1.6 prevents the Automatic conversion method 1 from working . As this is the recommended method for converting big files in hwdVideoShare the bug is being a bit of a pain for many users.

The problem has been addressed by the Joomla developers, and although it hasn't been published in the Joomla official releases yet an easy patch is available in http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=26493. Fortunately the patch is easy to apply manually. To do so edit the file <JOOMLA_ROOT>/libraries/joomla/session/session.php . Around line 13 you will find

After that line insert

That should do the trick and bring the Automatic Conversion method 1 back to life in Joomla 1.7 !

It seems such a long time ago when the hwdVideoShare project was launched in 2008 and the FLV format was the de-facto standard for streming video to the internet. Part of its success was the fact that the Adobe Flash plugin, required to reproduce this format, was installed in 99.9% of the personal computers connected to the internet. Only 3 years after that the scenario has changed noticeably, and more and more people consume multimedia content from smartphones, tablets and netbooks. The once ubiquitous FLV format has given way to the sophisticated and efficient MP4/H.264, required to stream video to the new breed of portable devices.

If you've been a faithful hwdVideoShare user before the H.264 revolution is likely that your gallery still has a good bunch of files encoded in the good old FLV format that your visitors are unable to reproduce in their mobile devices. Wouldn't it be great that you could transform those old files into new shiny HTML5-capable mp4 files? Absolutely!!

Many have been asking if we are making progress on the new HWDMediaShare component. Well I'm here to share some exciting information with you all. We are making great progress on the new component and we'd like to share some screenshots with you all. Below you'll see one of the views we've pretty much completed. It's the main media view for the component that displays all media listed on the site. We've gone into minute detail about the view so check it out.

HWD Media View

We paid close attention to making the new HWDMediaShare component fully Joomla! standardized. Using standard output and built in JLibrary functionality.

The image on the left highlights the features and functions that are on the Default Media page

1. Default HWD Menu.
2. Joomla standard Component Title and Media Layout
3. J! Search Filter.
4. J! Dropdown Filters.
5. J! Blog Layout.
6. Media Meta Data.
7. Default J! pagination.

Hello everyone,

Not being American, I don't know much about Black Friday, but I hear it's a day when America like to shop! In celebration of Black Friday, we're offering some great deals for all the community today, and through the rest of the weekend until Sunday 27th November.

We are offering a 20% OFF coupon to you, good for the purchase of all our templates, themes and our Developer plan. Here is the special coupon code that will unlock your savings: BLACKFRIDAY20.

Hi everybody!

Although we published our Amazon S3 plugin several months ago, we noticed that in the last weeks it has become one of the most valued plugins for our subscribers. That's why we decided it was the time to put some more love in it!

For those not familiar with the Amazon S3 service, it is basically an affordable highly available storage that can be used to host and serve static files taking advantage of Amazon huge infrastructure around the world. As other Amazon cloud services is uses a pay-as-you-use model, so you only pay for the storage and bandwidth used without any other fixed or hidden cost. Amazon S3 also offers some advanced features, such as rmtp streaming and their CDN network (cloudfront).

Using the S3 storage plugin video files are uploaded to a S3 "bucket" ( a file container in the S3 jargon ) so they will be downloaded from Amazon S3 servers using their huge bandwidth, releasing the web server the burden of handling big video files. You can get more insight about how the plugin works in this article in our documentation site.

The improvements added to the S3 storage plugin include suggestions from the users and catching up with features introduced by S3 in the last month, highlighting:

• Support for all existing S3 regions, while previously only the US eastern region could be used. S3 gives the possibility to host the files in several geographical locations ( US east, US west, Ireland, Japan, Singapore). This is quite useful if you are aware that most of your visitors are located in Europe or Asia, so it makes sense to host the files in a closer location instead of an ocean apart (the nearer the file the less latency). For more generous budgets the Cloudfront service can be used, so multiple copies of the file will be replicated around the world, allowing users to download the file from the closest location.
• Support for Reduced Redundancy Storage. By default Amazon S3 uses advanced techniques of replication to guarantee that you won't lose any data stored, even in the event of multiple hardware failure. If you don't need the super-duper durability (99.999999999%) S3 offers out of the box, and a 99.99% is good enough for you, you can upload your files with the RSS option to save around a 30% in storage costs. As you will probably have a copy of the video files in your webserver that seems a pretty good deal to me!
• Improve accuracy of the synchronization process for a graceful recovery of failed sync processes.
• Fixed synchronization process for Windows servers to avoid flaw in the Windows curl https implementation.

If you have any other suggestion that want to be added to the plugin, or discuss the current possibilities we will be glad to hear your thoughts in the forum.

Hello everyone. Happy Friday!

I’m proud to announce that we've just released another new Joomla 1.7 template & matching hwdVideoShare theme called hwdMotion!

hwdMotion is an exciting new DailyMotion-inspired Joomla 1.7 template and hwdVideoShare theme that's perfect for just about any website & video gallery. As with all of our new templates, hwdMotion is packed with features and includes plenty of editable parameters for deep customisation.

Hello everybody!

This month I have 3 new websites that I'd like to share with you, created by folks just like you, who use our hwdVideoShare and/or hwdPhotoShare software.

I'm proud to present November's “Dave’s Faves:"

We have been working super hard on the new hwdMediaShare software for the previous few months. The pace has really started to pick up on design and development, and most of the administratator interface is now complete. We have started work on some frontend views and hope to have a working demo website for you to play with soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to share just a few screenshots with you of the administrative screen. I feel that these 3 screenshots demonstrates some of the awesome new features which have been included.

Gary is, amoungst other things, a designer. One of the best designers in the Joomla-sphere. He has recently joined the hwdMediaShare project, and I am very excited to have him as our new Art Director. 

He brings a lot of experience and knowledge to hwdMediaShare, and we've not wasted any time cooking up some brillient ideas for the future of hwdMediaShare. Gary will mainly oversee the creative process during development and design of the new hwdMediaShare product and be an integral part of the new hwdMediaShare website which will be launched at the same time. Our objective is very simple; to provide an awesome, useful, functional web app for sharing media files online.