The VideoBox Blog

Update: We are officially out of shirts.

We have had a few t-shirts left over from a convention in Amsterdam this year (10 to be exact) and I’d like to offer them to the first ten people to respond in the comments of this post. There are 5 XLs and 5 XXLs, but they’re American Apparel shirts and sizes tend to run small.

So, if you’d like one of these snazzy shirts (I wear mine all the time), post your size preference (XL or XXL) in the comments section. Be sure to use your real email address in the form so I can contact you to get your mailing address.

Here’s what they look like:

Click the image for a larger view

Update: We are officially out of shirts.

There were a lot of finishers this week. Twenty four, to be exact. I also tried out a new format this week. Let me know if you like it!

Fresh Faces #6, Scene 1 starring Gwen I guess Gwen didn’t want cum in her hair (she held it back). Or in her eyes (squeezed shut). Or on her face (moved out of the line of fire).

Hand To Hand Combat, Scene 10 starring Brianna Love Brianna Love is really cute. But some of the faces she’s making here are not. Getting this guy to cum seems like squeezing water from a stone. This is a great movie in which every girl finishes, but this is not my favorite scene.

Hand To Hand Combat, Scene 9 starring Crista Moore and Shawna Lenee Christa bobs Shawna’s head on the cock for a while, but when he starts coming, they seem slightly surprised and and up licking it off their fingers.

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I’m sure many of you have already noticed that the new Flash player went live this week. I just wanted to open the comments for any feedback you guys have on it. It’s really important to us that 1) you like it and 2) it works correctly. So post your thoughts, positive, negative or mixed in the comments.

We’ll be debuting our redesigned Flash player within the next week or so on VideoBox and I’ve got a preview of the design and functionality exclusively for blog readers.

The Design
A little sleeker and easier on the eyes, the new design tightens up the player a bit while delivering all of the features you’ve come to expect from it.

Click for larger image


What’s New
The new player also comes with a few changes:

• The playhead is now separate from the filmstrip, so you can look ahead in the movie without being flung back to where you were.
• The controls no longer show up over top of the video.
• The volume control is more intuitive and easy to use.

I’m interested to hear what you guys think about the new design. Now and after it launches.

Have you ever been watching a scene and said to yourself, “Man, I bet so-and-so would like this”? If so, we’ve got a new feature you’re going to like. You can now email a scene to anyone (over 18) whether they’re a member or not and even have it start at a particular time in the video.

So let’s say you’re watching Filthy Talkin’ Cocksuckers #2, scene 1 and you crack up at the ridiculous cumshot at the end. You’d click the Share This Video link under the download buttons:

click image to enlarge

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I’ve been meaning to write a blog entry for a while, but I hadn’t quite gotten around to it when we ran into this iPhone issue. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to introduce myself and talk about the issue at the same time

Who Am I?
I’m the Tech Guy, and my team and I are responsible for keeping the site up and running. We implement new features on the site, maintain and monitor our systems to ensure that the videos keep streaming, and build toolsets for our internal teams to use for encoding and labelling content. In short, we’re responsible for everything from networking to storage, from servers to systems, and from code to video codecs. Now that I’ve introduced myself, let me talk about the issue we’ve run into.

The iPhone 3g / 2.0 Problem
Recently the iPhone 3g was released, and like most tech geeks we were really excited. Quite a few of us have iPhones, and we couldn’t wait to see what the new one could do. Unfortunately, when we got our hands on an iPhone 3g we immediately saw a problem - iPod resolution files from VideoBox wouldn’t play. We saw a “This Movie Format Not Supported” message when we tried to play these files on the new iPhone. The problem got worse quickly, when we realized that older iPhones that were updated to the iPhone 2.0 firmware suffered from the same problem.

Now this was surprising, as Apple had said that there were no video related changes coming in the 3g or the 2.0 firmware. But we’re not the only ones who’ve been bitten by this issue - you can see more here

The good news is that we’re on top of it. Our H.264 resolution files can still be played on iPhones of all types. And we’ve found an encoding configuration that is compatible with the iPhone, compatible with older iPods and other devices that play these files, and still maintains the quality of video we expect.

What We’re Doing About It
We’re currently in the process of reencoding all the files in this resolution. We expect to be finished with this reencode process in about three weeks. These updated files will appear on the site as they are produced, so fewer and fewer scenes will have this problem as time goes on.

I’ll be checking back on this blog post over the next few days, and I’ll try to answer any questions you may have about this or any other tech issue in the comments. I’m also planning on posting more frequently - once a month or so - about technology issues that might be interesting to our users.

For the past month, I’ve had the pleasure of beta testing a small VideoBox add-on program that is designed to block selected member comments from the movie review section. This application represents the latest response from the site to satisfy subscriber requests. Let’s take a brief look at the program, which is expected to be made available to the full membership within the next several weeks.

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Today we’re launching SSL or HTTPS support for a number of pages on the site. This includes the login page, change password form and other user specific sections. You’re probably familiar with “lock” or secure icon in the bottom window of your browser. This form of surfing means the data transmitted is encrypted from your source computer all the way to our destination web servers. Thus folks in your office, dorm or other environments can’t “sniff” your login information. This is a great value if you’re browsing on unsecured WiFi or other shared networks.

For clarification, our billing partners have always received your credit card billing information in this fashion. Extensive testing has been done for the past few weeks to minimize problems. As always, please escalate any issues via the tech support request form.

P.S. I’m sure the uber geeks will point out that HTTPS doesn’t prevent MITM or Man-in-the-middle attacks are still possible. You pervs!

We’ve gotten several customer service emails lately asking why we don’t ban more members for making offensive or off-topic reviews. My feelings about this are mixed, but I think the opinions of paying members are really the ones we ought to be listening to. So I’d like to pose this question to you guys: should we be doing things differently?


Feel free to expand on your feelings in the comments. It’s a complicated issue and I may have missed a point of view with those four choices.

You’ve probably noticed that clicking the screen pictures on the DVD page no longer takes you to another page. Instead, an overlay comes up with a couple of new options. When you click “Preview,” a 10 second Flash clip starts playing that will give you an idea of what’s going on at that point in the scene.

We try to pick screen pictures that show all of the actions/positions in the scene. You can pretty much expect:

• The first one is usually people with their clothes on (or naked if the director didn’t bother with a setup). You can usually get a decent look at the girl in that one, which is helpful for figuring out whether she’s actually hot.
• The second tends to be a blowjob (porn’s kinda predictable in that way).
• The third through fifth are usually a couple of the positions from the scene. It’s amazing how much you can tell about a scene in 10 seconds.
• The last one is always the pop shot unless it’s a lesbian movie. For some reason those seem to usually end with kissing. Go figure.

We hope you’re finding this new feature useful. Feel free to give your thoughts on it in the comments section.