Vuze Blog

To Utility…and beyond!

Today, we’re shipping a great update to Vuze. Check Chris’ post for the full scoop, but needless to say, there are many things I’m excited about.

First the packaging – We’ve entirely revamped our website. “What’s with the dark background” some of you would ask. Well, our website was about video content, so it made sense to create an immersive look-and-feel. Today, we’re more focused on features, and ease of use. We’re about utility. So it made sense to redesign the site to articulate what Vuze does, with a more “utilitarian” look, and a lot of real estate dedicated to features. And yes, it’s on a white theme.

Speaking of utility and features, we are also releasing Vuze 4.4, with a lot of cool stuff in store, such as a major update of our video player: It’s fast, it supports gorgeous 1080p, and it has subtitles and languages built-in. We’re also upgrading our device playback engine, with faster transcoding and new native support for iPad and connected TVs such as Samsung.

Also, we’re launching a version of Vuze with premium features. Vuze Plus is a new offering that we’re super excited about. We see it as a great way to finance all the innovation that goes into Vuze, and allow the main product to remain free. Some call it a freemium model, I call it a win-win for users.  All Vuze users will benefit from us having more resources to innovate with the product they love, and Vuze Plus users will enjoy top-notch features (DVD burning, better search, torrent virus scanning) neatly integrated into Vuze.

Overall, today’s release is a small “avant-gout” of big things to come later in 2010. We’re working on a new project. It’s about digital media, it’s about your television, it’s not related to bittorrent.  In fact, in many ways, it’s not related to your computer. Quite simply, its about doing more with your digital entertainment.  We can’t say much about it just yet, but we think you’ll love it.

In the meantime, enjoy the new site, Vuze 4.4, and Vuze Plus, and as always, let us know what you think.

Gilles.

Play it fast. Play it safe. Play it anywhere.

The past two releases have focused on improving your ability to quickly find and download the content you want to play.  With this release, the Vuze team concentrated on improving the ways you play your content – on your PC and Mac, on the other screens in your life (now including the iPad and Connected TVs), and simply by burning a DVD.

More specifically, Vuze 4.4 includes a significant upgrade to both the Vuze HD Player and Device Playback.  In addition, we spent some time building three of your most requested features – DVD burning, built-in antivirus protection, and better search – as part of a new offering called Vuze Plus.  Intrigued? Read on.

With today’s release, the Vuze HD Player received a significant update, including:

•  Higher quality playback: Smoother playback for HD content (including 1080p)
•  More formats: Improved format support (including avi, wmv, mpeg, xvid, Quicktime, and more)
•  Subtitles: A very cool integration with OpenSubtitles enabling you to pull in subtitles for any content and language the OpenSubtitle community has translated
•  Faster and Lighter: Significantly faster launch and lighter weight playback.

Props to both the MPlayer and OpenSubtitle.org teams for enabling us to stand on the shoulders of the giant that is open source!

Speaking of improved playback, we’ve also updated Vuze Device Playback to significantly improve the quality and speed of device transfers.

Since Vuze launched device support, more than 3 million of you have used Vuze Devices to transfer and playback more than 70 million items on your iPhone, iPod, Xbox, PS3, PSP, and Tivo.   You seem to like the ability to drag-and-drop to play back on the device of your choice…

Aside from your rave reviews, we’ve also been listening to your requests to improve device transfer speeds and decrease the failure rates when files don’t successfully transfer to the device of your choice.  This release updates the core infrastructure for Vuze Devices to significantly improve device transfer performance — both speed and success rates.

And one more thing on the device playback front… Vuze now supports transfer and playback on iPad and Connected TVs (with DLNA support).

Introducing Vuze Plus

Beyond improving Vuze’s core features enabling you to find, download, and play, we’ve also heard your requests for a variety of new features.  Today, we’re launching a premium version called Vuze Plus that includes DVD Burn, Built-in Antivirus, and Power Search.

Finally, we have an answer for all your questions about how to burn DVDs from Vuze.  We’re not talking about crude data DVDs for storage and transport.  We’re talking about easily burning playable DVDs for playback on any standard DVD player.  Simply drag-and-drop videos from your Vuze Library or anywhere on your desktop, organize your playlist, and click burn.

Downloading from the web can be intimidating.  We’ve heard your worries about malware, viruses, and scams.  To address your concerns, we’ve teamed with BitDefender to deliver a fully built-in antivirus solution that scans all the files you download with Vuze Plus to proactively protect you before problems occur.

Finally, we consistently hear that you want additional sites added to Vuze Meta Search.  Power Search includes twice as many search sites to offer more comprehensive results so you quickly find what you’re looking for.

The new Vuze HD Player and Device Playback features are immediately available in Vuze 4.4 (our flagship app that’s free as always).  For those of you that want a little extra spice, DVD Burning, Built-in Antivirus, and Power Search will be offered as Vuze Plus for $24.99.  Offering Vuze Plus will enable us to build some of the extra features many of you have been requesting, without adding bloat to the main Vuze app you know and love.  In addition, charging a nominal fee for Vuze Plus will enable us to work with leading partners like BitDefender to offer some of the cool features you’ve been requesting.

Let us know what you think!

Chris

Vuze Remote and Faster Downloads

Have you ever been out, and realized that you forgot to queue a Vuze download to watch when you get home?  With the new Vuze Remote, you can now securely control your Vuze client from any computer or smartphone with a web browser.  Pretty cool, eh?  Not to mention, very useful for those meetings or classes where your mind has already fast forwarded to Friday night entertainment…

Once you have the latest Vuze release,  simply go to remote.vuze.com from any browser, or download the Vuze Remote toolbar here.  After a one-time pairing of the Vuze client and your browser, you’ll be ready to find and control all your Vuze downloads remotely over the web.

Your remote instructions pass directly and securely between your Vuze client and a web page in your remote browser.  Props to the Transmission team, as we leveraged their original web UI in developing Vuze Remote (open source ftw!).

We’ll continue to expand the functionality of Vuze Remote going forward.  Stay tuned…

Faster Downloads

This release also includes a number of significant performance improvements resulting from our ongoing Olympic training to make Vuze downloads even faster.

You should notice significantly faster torrent start-up times and subsequent download speeds, as a result of :

• Faster initiation of new torrents through “Allowed Fast” support (enabling new peers to quickly start downloading despite their lack of pieces to trade)
• Connecting to more seeds and peers on launch of a new torrent (for Vista SP2+ and Windows 7), and through optimized support of LibTorrent peer exchange
• Quickly switching to better performing peers through faster connection timeouts
• Faster ramp-up of better performing peers.

Bottomline – you should experience significantly faster torrent start-up and download speeds.

Reigning in Mr. Slidey

Finally, remember Microsoft’s infamously reviled Clippy – the animated paperclip in Office 2000 and XP?  For a long period of time, Vuze has had a similarly reviled Slidey that popped up with error messages in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.  With this release, we’ve finally fought Mr. Slidey into a corner, and locked him in the closet.  You can find all your favorite error messages by clicking on the exclamation point in the bottom-right corner of the Vuze client.  Don’t care to be bothered?  Please feel free to ignore.  Sometimes, it’s the small steps forward that count.

Download Vuze 4.3.1.2 and give it a try.  Tell us what you think!

Gilles and the Vuze Team