Particles will be present at LeWeb’09 next week in Paris, France. The show will take place on Dec 9th and 10th!

With over 1800 participants from 30 countries, LeWeb is the #1 European Internet event.

LeWeb brings together the best and the brightest people of the web industry from attendees to speakers. Take advantage of a unique setting of networking areas around the main stage to meet your peers, to get inspired, to grow your business, to develop partnerships…

We’ll be so pleased to meet you there and introduce our Video Web Services:
- HeyWatch, our Video Transcoding Platform
- HeySpread, our Video Distribution and Tracking Platform

Feel free to contact Eric, our VP Business - eric(dot)fontaine(at)particle-s(dot)com

We are very proud to announce a new partnership with one of the trendiest and powerful Online Video Platform, LongTail Video.

LongTail Video is the premier destination for online video solutions. Whether you’re a webmaster searching for the best online player compatible with dozens of plugins and skins; a consumer looking for a great desktop player; or a publisher interested in monetizing their videos, LongTail Video can help.

The Company’s media players have streamed billions of videos and their AdSolution serves millions of pre-roll, overlay mid-roll and post-roll ads daily. LongTail solves the video puzzle… one piece at a time.

Now, you can select two powerful modules to personalize your LongTail Video platform:
- HeyWatch if you need professional and fully customizable Online Video Transcoding - here -
- HeySpread if you want to mass-distribute and track your video over the Web - here -

Hi People,

If you need a white label social network platform, you already know Kickapps for sure. KickApps provides brands, enterprises and web publishers with solutions that enable them to create and manage next generation web experiences that are social, interactive, dynamic, distributed, and data-informed. KickApps solutions consist of a suite of hosted social and media applications and services that are used by some of the world’s largest websites and brands to grow & engage their online audiences and foster deeper relationships with customers.

KickApps clients include HBO, CW Television Network, National Geographic, Guinness World Records, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Kraft, the Special Olympics and numerous professional sports teams around the world such as the San Francisco 49ers or even the Phoenix Suns.

Kickapps chose HeyWatch to externalize all its heavy video encoding processes. They started having their internal encoding solution. But quickly, they realized that it was too difficult to maintain and so, so expensive. Thus, they decided to contact Pros. Now, they have the Highest Video Quality and they save Money thanks to HeyWatch.

Hi People,

If you are a Twitter fan and a video addict, you will love TwitVid for sure. TwitVid lets you share videos on Twitter. Simple but so great. You can share your video from the site itself using the uploader, a dead simple API, your mobile via Email or MMS. And also via a your Webcam.

You can get your TwitVid Widget and show your latest TwitVids on your blog or site.

Besides, great addictive features are coming soon such as Realtime uploads. With Realtime uploads your followers will be able to watch the video as it’s uploading.

TwitVid uses HeyWatch to convert videos in the highest quality for their users.

By the way, the TwitVid team is currently integrating HeySpread to allow their users to automatically upload their videos to YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and others.

TwitVid is the next so promising Twitter service. You will be addict.

Some of our customers wanted to have full control over the H264 settings because our default ones don’t fit their needs. It’s okay and this is why we decided to bring you all the X264 options (only via API for now).

Add the “x264_options” parameter to your job / download request and you’re ready to go. The form must be:

x264_options=param1:value1,param2:value2,...

See the full documentation here.

We need to warn you: don’t use this option if you don’t know what you’re doing. The default settings we’re using should just be fine for most of you.

Here are the full list of available parameters (ffmpeg names not the x264 ones):

We strongly advise you to read these sites before starting:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264
• http://sites.google.com/site/linuxencoding/x264-ffmpeg-mapping
• http://sites.google.com/site/linuxencoding/x264-encoding-guide
• http://wiki.heywatch.com/API+Documentation+Job

This is a beta feature, so we don’t charge more credits for now, and of course we’d love to hear your feedbacks via Twitter or via email.

Hope you enjoy.

Hi People,

If you are a photo lover, you obviously know Fotolia. Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations.

But after Photos, Fotolia has just launched its video offering. Fotolia is launching with 10,000 royalty free video clips that can be used in video ads, on Websites, mobile animations, and more.

And to deliver the Hightest Video Quality over the World, they partner with HeyWatch. They externalize all their video encoding processes with us. We transcode their videos in 6 different formats to fit all needs: Small Web Video, Big Web, NTSC Video, PAL Video, HD 720, HD 1080.

Why they chose HeyWatch? Simple integration via a REST API, Powerful CPU, Fast & Real-Time Encoding, Dedicated Video Format Creation, 2-Pass, and Money Savings!

Dear People,

We will experience a downtime for both HeyWatch and HeySpread, due to an electricity network improvement coming from our Web hosting provider.

This will take 1 hour max. But maybe far less.

Please, check your timezone below:
- April, Monday the 6 from 6pm to 7pm EST (USA)
- April, Monday the 6 from 3pm to 4pm PST (USA)
- April, Tuesday the 7 between midnight and 1am GMT+2 (Europe)

We are sorry for the inconvenience, even if it is not on our side.

Best regards,

Eric Fontaine.
VP Business.

Hi People,

We have just created the product page for Particles on Facebook.
Become a Fan to be updated with all the new features. Besides, let us know what you would like to see on both HeyWatch and HeySpread. We want this page to be a new way to communicate.

See you on Facebook!

To upload a video to Amazon S3, we used the path-style URL like http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Buckets located in Europe because Amazon only allows virtual hosted URL like http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com as explained in their documentation.

To access Amazon S3 buckets and objects that were created using CreateBucketConfiguration, you must use the virtual hosted-style request.

We finally fixed this, so our upload is compatible with EU Buckets. This forum discussion is now closed.

We’ve just added some optimization to the H264 encoding. The video looks much better now, especially at low bitrate. See the image below for the comparison (click to view the original version):

This is done automatically for all the H264 encodings.