Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Revver Going Down for Planned Outage 1/28/2009, 5:00 pm-10:00 pm or so

I just saw a late posting on the Revver forums. The official word is that Revver and all related services (including video serving) are scheduled to go down at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, 1/28/2009 (as of right now that's in less than half an hour). They hope to be up and running again by 10:00 p.m. or so.

I'm not sure exactly what prompted this. Hopefully they are doing something which will make the system more stable in the long run :)

1/29/2009: At this point I don't know that the outage actually took place. I checked back 2 hours and 15 minutes after it was supposed to have started and Revver was (presumably still) up and running. I haven't seen any indication from anyone that it actually went down at any point during the planned time period.

1/29/2009, 4:47pm: Ok, now it seems that Revver and all related sites (and video serving) are down. If I knew more, I'd tell you :)

1/31/2009, 10:55am PST: Ok, now I know more (I think). Although Revver is still down, to the extent that the Brad Greenspan's quote in this article on CNet:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10153816-2.html

can be relied on, it looks like Revver will be back online soon (although it's already missed the time frame specified in the quote).


2/2/2009, 8:22 PST: I see Revver video serving is *FINALLY* back up again (along with Revver.com). No sign of the Revver forums, the Revver blog, or LiveUniverse.com and PageFlakes.com yet (not that I really care much one way or the other whether those last two non-Revver sites are up or not, but I checked out of curiousity). And I mean my heavily emphasized "finally" in the sense of "Good grief, it's about time!" rather than in the sense that I have any firm conviction that it won't go down again. *
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Friday, January 9, 2009

Revver Down (Temporarily I Hope)

I had hoped to be able to post a Revver video here today. Maybe I'll get the chance later, but as of right now Revver seems to be totally down.

By totally, I mean Revver.com, the Revver blog, and the Revver forums are all inaccessible as far as I can tell. Worse, it looks like video hosting is affected as well. Of course, there's always the possibility that it is a lesser problem, specific to my ISP (ATT), although that would also be bad.

Either way, I hope the situation is of short duration. It's always a bit disconcerting when something like this happens. Doubly so when it involves an entity which is behind in payments to its users. Still, I won't write a premature obituary for Revver just yet. They've come back from this sort of problem before. I hope that will be the case this time as well.

Later in the day: OK, it's all back online now. I'm sure what went wrong, but hopefully the fix is enduring :)
*
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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Video Liberty Project

The video featured in yesterday's post falls into the general category of "open-licensed video". If you are interested in this type of video for use in your own productions or if it's something you'd like to create and allow other people to use, I encourage you to take a look at Stuart Whitmore's Video Liberty Project

In addition to a brief explanation of the concept, the site offers some relevant articles, as well as some descriptions of and links to a number of Liberated Videos (typically available under the terms of one of the Creative Commons Licenses). *
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Monday, January 5, 2009

Train Crash Clip (cc license)

I took some silent footage of a staged train crash from the 1913 movie "California State Fair Highlights" (Progressive Film Producing Company of America) and added some sound effects and dramatic music. I'm offering free use of the resulting clip under a Creative Commons license (details available on the related page to which I've provided a link below the video):



related web page: http://videos.viewmyart.com/clips/video-train-crash.htm *
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