Check out Vegas project file upload!

[john bolton]

Ops Typo… Should say V18.. 🙁

[Steve Rhoden]

Working fine…..

[Graham Bernard]

Hi Tim! I notice I can UPLOAD MP4. Will this play automatically as per the OLD Cowshed did?

I’ve got a ton of Tutes for The Shed!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Graham,

The MP4 feature described here is just allowing the upload of that file type through the firewall, without having to zip. It’s not a player.

It’s easy to forget that we had not had a built in player in the old COW for years. We’d turned it off in 2011, I think. In those days, we were getting so many takedown notices for videos with unlicensed music (mostly in reels) that it was turning into a full time job for multiple people to try to manage. We hosted over 10,000 reels at the time, I think more than Vimeo at the time (although surely not now), and were sending over 30TB of hosted video every day!

The takedown letters we got were insanely specific too. They’d give us the timecode for the unlicensed music within the videos, sometimes only a few seconds long, but just enough to trigger fees and penalties where only a single clip might represent more money than we’d ever made.

You may remember cases in the Napster era when some teenager would get sued for uploading 16 songs, and the damages were more than the combined GDP of every nation in human history. We were a big and obvious a target, but still a family owned business with a very small team.

Without the staff to vet every video before it went up, or to respond to every legal demand quickly enough, we solved the problem by no longer hosting video at all, and only supporting embedded videos. YouTube and Vimeo have resources to manage rights and payments and takedowns and all the rest.

Our first step here is to support many more embeds than the old COW did. Nowadays, in addition to supporting YT and Vimeo, we also do Dailymotion, Facebook, imgur, Instagram, and nearly two dozen others, automatically embedding when you post the URL of the page with the video. No embed code necessary.

That said, we’re working with our dev team and our lawyers to support multiple dimensions of this. We need to give rights holders more automated ways to submit takedown orders without our having to manually intervene, we need to organize payments into music royalty organizations around the world (the only place we don’t currently have members is Antarctica, but we have before, and surely will again), and we also need to update our player tech from what was considered state of the art 10 years ago. 🙂

The tech aspect of hosting and playing back video is easy enough, and we’re within sight of have a state of the art video playback engine…but hosting the actual video files for playback on a site our size has legal and financial ramifications in a more complicated music rights landscape than 2011 that we are still scoping out.

That may be more of an answer than you were looking for, but that’s the actual answer. We’ll be back in the video hosting business as soon as we’re confident that we can stay in business while hosting video. Or, more specifically, taking on the liability of unlicensed music in those hosted videos.

In the scheme of things, we’d make our lives easier if we forbade audio on video clips that we hosted, but if we were interested in easy lives, we wouldn’t be doing this at all, would we?

We’ll get there as soon as we can, though!

Allllll of that said, drop me an email, and let’s talk about getting your tutorials up!

Thanks again,

Tim