The VideoBox Blog

Here at Videobox we have a friendly war going on between the VB3 team and the Content-Ops team. While all of Content-Ops was in Vegas this year for the AEE Convention, the VB3 team saran wrapped our entire section!! Every single thing in our area (from post-it notes to garbage cans) is literally covered in layers upon layers of saran wrap. I honestly have to hand it to them, they got us pretty good. but this shit is seriously on!!! VB3 better start sleeping with one eye open, because this is definitely NOT OVER!!

Hey Everyone,

In the spirit of less text and more show, here are some photos from our final day at AEE.



Kristina Rose



Annie Cruz with Alec Knight



Rachel Starr



Tory Lane



Diamond Kitty



Trina Michaels



Bree Olson



Tara Lynn Fox



Tiffany Star



Gianna Michaels



Gina Lynn


We’ve got a lot more footage to come, so stay tuned and remember to check back regularly for more photos and videos from this years Adult Entertainment Expo!!

- Phil

Hey Videoboxers,

Phil here reporting to you guys from the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. We’ve got a ton of awesome footage and photos to share with you guys, but for now I’m going to share some highlights from Day 1 and 2.

Day 1 – VIP Bowling Party with Digital Sin/New Sensations




Kagney Linn Karter Hitting The Lanes with a Disney Princess Bowling Ball!!





Kagney Linn Karter was bowling right next to us, she was very sweet and took a picture with us.



The beautiful Courtney Cummz!



I caught Alexis Texas just before she left and jumped in for a photo! =)



Just before we called it a night, I ran into Steve Holmes at the circle bar (inside the Venetian).


Day 2 – AEE Convention


Our good friend Annie Cruz came with us to the convention and did a killer job as the Videobox Hostess. Here are some of the stars we talked to:



Allison Moore



Dana DeArmond



Joanna Angel



Nina Hartley



Kagney Linn Karter



Sophie Dee



Jynx Maze



Kelly Madison



Zoe Voss



Cali Lee



Monique Alexander



Francesca Le



Phoenix Marie


So far I’ve had an amazing time at AEE! Thank you to all the stars that took the time to chat with us. I’m excited for Day 3, so be sure to check back on the blog tomorrow night when we close out our final night in Fabulous Las Vegas! Cheers!

- Phil

Hey Videoboxers,

I just wanted to let you guys know that we are aware that Teen Euro #4 (released 12-09-10 at 5:00am) is a duplicate release. To make up for this we will be releasing an additional title at noon today. We apologize for the inconvenience, sit tight and we’ll have another title up for you guys shortly!

- Phil

Hey everyone,

We are aware that many of you are having problems downloading custom clips from WMV files. Some of the common issues we’ve observed include:

1. Custom clips downloads end up downloading an entire movie
2. Windows Media Player gives an error when trying to stream a custom clip
3. Custom clip playback issues

We’ve been working tirelessly to resolve this issue for the last week, and I’m happy to report that we’ve found a solution! We’ll be pushing out this fix and re-encoding the affected files. We expect all instances of this problem to be absolved by the end of this week. If any of you experience further issues downloading custom clips from WMV after the end of this week, please report your issues to Customer Support. In the meantime, you can continue downloading custom clips using the new custom clip method and downloading your clips in H.264 format. When using the new custom clip mode, simply select either the “iPhone” or “H264″ file format. Again, I apologize for the recent issues with WMV files — we definitely hear your reports of such problems, and our main priority is to ensure that you have the best user experience on Videobox.

Cheers!
Phil

Hey Videoboxers,

Phil here with a quick update about WMV files with no audio. I’m happy to report that we’ve found a solution to this issue, and all known files affected by this are currently being re-encoded. We traced this problem down to a new codec pack that we’ve installed on our encoding hosts, which started causing the issue with WMV. Fortunately, H.264 files are not affected. We expect the re-encode to be completed in the next couple of days. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for reporting these issues to Customer Support.


- Phil

I’ve recently realized that I’ve probably watched every single scene on Videobox. Three years ago that might not have seemed like much, but today—with over 53,000 scenes on Videobox, plus all the content that we’re working on-behind-the scenes— it ultimately adds up to a whole lot of porn! My name is Phil, and I’m the encoding manager here at Videobox. I’ve been working here since 2006 and, over the years, I’ve learned a lot about the world of porn, but, more specifically, I’ve learned a lot about the world of video encoding. Online video formats are ever-changing, and we’re always striving to offer all of our members the most versatile format options to meet your entertainment needs. Back in 2005, our encoding process was quite simple since we only encoded four wmv formats for every scene on Videobox, but as Flash and H.264 started to become more popular, we started encoding as many as eight formats for every scene. Today, we’ve narrowed it down to five main formats, which include three different quality options for wmv and two different quality options for mp4, which also uses the popular H.264 codec. Below is a brief chart of our video formats throughout the years.

* the low quality wmv format was removed
** also used for streaming in the Flash player

In addition to encoding all of the content we release on Videobox, I also work with Customer Support to re-encode and fix content problems reported by our users. On that note, I want to give a big thank you to all of our users who take the time to report content issues. Our content generally goes through a pretty extensive QA process, but mistakes do slip through from time to time, and videos have sometimes been badly encoded due to poor source material or the process of re-encoding our entire catalog to accommodate new formats. If you spot a problem, shoot a message to Customer Support and we’ll have it re-encoded ASAP!


Since this is my first post, I also want to answer two frequently asked questions that I’ve noticed over the years:


Q: Why are movies with the label “Shot in HD” on the cover not encoded in HD?

A:This label on a movie cover simply means that the content was shot with HD cameras. The source content we get still comes on a regular DVD, which is 480p (standard definition). Most of the titles that are shot in HD are not offered in HD or on Blu-ray disc.

Q: Why do some scenes have bad aspect ratios?

A:Some of the DVDs we receive have anamorphic aspect ratios. These movies have extra lines of information inserted in a 4:3 signal, which the TV is then supposed to expand to fill a 16:9 screen. If a DVD player is set to 16:9 mode, but viewed on a 4:3 TV, an anamorphic movie will appear stretched vertically due to the extra horizontal lines present in the image.  However, if the movie is viewed on a 16:9 widescreen TV, the TV automatically stretches the image horizontally back to the correct aspect ratio. When we first encoded these movies, they were encoded with a 4:3 aspect ratio so that the scenes looked like they were vertically stretched. We have since fixed this issue and have been going through our catalog and repairing all the files that still have bad aspect ratios. If you find more scenes with bad aspect ratios, please report them to Customer Support.

I’m excited to start contributing more posts to the Videobox blog, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have regarding our videos. Thanks for reading!


Cheers!
Phil