Archive for the 'Mininova-related news' Category

Site improvements and a new office

Published on February 19, 2009 in Interesting links, Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 165 Comments

Hi everyone,

It has been a while since Mininova has undergone some changes, but today we’re releasing some new features, including:

  • A layout update, the top advertisement banner is gone.
  • An improved search field with the possibility to restrict your search to a specific category.
  • The search results are also improved, including the highlighting of the results (example).
  • New buttons on several pages (thanks to a technique described by Google developer Douglas Bowman).
  • Instead of creating a torrent file and seeding your data, you can now use VIPeers for uploading. VIPeers is a free service that will create a torrent file, seed your content and send you back to the Mininova upload page, where you can fill in the details.
  • “Remember me” checkbox on the login page, the possibility to remain logged in, even when you quit your browser and connect via another Internet network. Although this may be very useful, do not use this option on a public computer (in a library or so).
  • New servers to keep up with the growing number of visitors. These servers will be installed in a few days.
  • The new Mininova officeSome bug fixes.
  • We moved to a new office location in downtown Utrecht, The Netherlands. We used to rent a small office space at Regus, but we had a very bad experience (note to startups: do NOT rent at Regus! They will try to nail you with the agreement). We are happy with our new office inside a classical building alongside the city canal. See our contact page for more information. We’ll put up some more pictures on Picasa.

We hope you will enjoy these changes! Let us know if you experience any problems.

Mininova Content Distribution welcomes 1000th participant

Published on January 21, 2009 in Mininova-related news. 82 Comments

Hi everyone, we just send out the following press release:

Free distribution channel for producers and artists successful

Mininova Content Distribution welcomes 1000th participant

Today, BitTorrent platform Mininova welcomes the 1000th professional user of its Content Distribution service. This service enables producers and artists to distribute their work in a simple way and free of charge through the website www.mininova.org.

Erik Dubbelboer, co-founder of Mininova: “Content Distribution enables producers and artists to bring their work to the attention of the public, free of charge. It’s the perfect solution for bands that don’t have the means to bring out a record yet. Since the launch in 2007, an average of three participants a day have registered.” Mininova offers a platform on the Internet for the exchange of information by users through BitTorrent technology.

Success in the Netherlands and abroad
In 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation decided to offer a television series for free by using Content Distribution. The popular Dutch band ‘Silence is Sexy’ also decided to use this system in 2008, and distributed an entire album for free. The band recently won the Interactive Award 2009 for doing so.

Thirty kilometers of CDs
Dubbelboer: “Through Content Distribution, we have already had about 5.800 uploads and 15 million downloads. That means some 40.000 downloads a day. The amount of data that has been downloaded equals a pile of CDs of about 30 kilometers high!” For 2009, Mininova is expecting an explosive growth in the number of professional users of its Content Distribution service.

For access to Mininova Content Distribution: www.mininova.org/apply

Mininova’s fourth birthday!

Published on January 14, 2009 in Mininova-related news. 120 Comments

Hi everyone,

It’s January 14, and that means we’re celebrating Mininova’s fourth birthday today!

The past year was a very interesting year: we saw the number of Content Distribution users/producers grow to more than 1000. The total number of downloads nearly doubled this year and reached 7 billion last week. We’re now serving 10+ million (unique) downloads a day, and handling over 8 million daily search queries. Some more stats: in December we counted 44.7 million unique users who generated 683.7 million pageviews on Mininova.

Of course we made a bunch of improvements to Mininova on our other website, Snotr. We moved our server, got sued, and counted billions of downloads. Overall, a very busy year, which would have never been possible without our dedicated team of moderators: thank you!

We are excited about the coming year and its challenges: please stay tuned for some important announcements in the coming months.

Cheers! The Mininova team

Silence is Sexy/Mininova nominated for award

Published on January 8, 2009 in Mininova-related news. 21 Comments

Hi there,

Almost 4 months ago, we wrote that the Dutch indie band Silence is Sexy joined Mininova to distribute their full album for free. Their album This Ain’t Hollywood has been downloaded by almost 15 thousand users using the Mininova Content Distribution service.

Due to this success, the band has been nominated for the Interactive Award 2009. We think that every band that uses torrents as a promotion tool deserves an award, so please hit 5 stars and vote for them on the website.

That’s it for now, please stay tuned for more updates soon! :)

Update: Silence is Sexy won the award! More info on their blog.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Published on December 24, 2008 in Mininova-related news. 83 Comments

Hi all,

A short blog post this time:

The Mininova team wishes you a

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We hope you have a great time and hope to see you again in 2009!

Cheers!

Mininova Christmas logo

Mininova and Hyper MP testing new technology

Published on November 19, 2008 in Mininova-related news and Reports/mails. 225 Comments

Hi all,

We are pleased to announce that Mininova is testing a new technology which allows users to download and watch licensed movies and TV shows for free. These videos will be packaged by Hyper MP technology and are going to be distributed using Mininova Content Distribution for free. The unique feature of this system is that the videos can be downloaded and played anywhere in the world (no geo-targeting), and will make use of a new in-video advertising technology.

The first beta test release for this technology trial is an amateur feature length comedy titled “Battle Therapy”. The film, produced by Australian film school students, is a wacky comedy about an unorthodox psychologist and his obsessive compulsive patients.

Make sure to check our this movie by downloading the following torrent: http://www.mininova.org/tor/2020297. The movie is packaged in a Windows executable and is free of viruses and DRM, so don’t let that deter you from downloading it. After viewing the movie, please feel free to send feedback on your experience with this technology to feedback@hypermp.com.

Please note that this first release is a trial only and it is not representative of the quality of feature length content that will follow upon the official release of the service. In order to assist in polishing the technology, all the feedback you are willing to provide will be greatly appreciated.

That’s it for now, stay tuned for more updates soon!

Snotr.com improvements: mobile version, subscriptions, Twitter, TV, etc

Published on November 6, 2008 in Interesting links and Mininova-related news. 20 Comments

Hi everyone!

The past few weeks, we have been working on our side project, the video-site Snotr.com. Launched in July 2007, Snotr is a website that publishes hand-picked funny videos on a daily basis. Videos can be submitted by everyone and a moderator team chooses which ones get published.

During the first few months after its launch, Snotr was linked on the frontpage of Mininova. Right now, it has quite a lot of regular visitors and the traffic keeps increasing. Some videos have already been viewed more than a million times!

Snotr on your mobile phone!A big improvement is the new video player, which supports viewing videos in fullscreen and works just as you would expect of a video player. Another interesting feature is m.snotr.com, the mobile version of Snotr we’re lauching. If you have a mobile phone with Internet access, you can watch all Snotr videos on-the-go. If you want to post comments, rate videos, etc. you still have to navigate to the desktop version of Snotr.

Other improvements, as listed on the Snotr frontpage, are:

  • Statistics on the right side of the frontpage.
  • New smilies: :P and :S.
  • Voting on comments.
  • A Snotr toolbar, for easier watching and submitting.
  • A Twitter page, so you can stay up to date.
  • Subscriptions, receive an email with the best videos periodically.
  • Snotr TV, watch videos continuously (for example on your TV).

I you haven’t checked out Snotr yet: make sure to visit the website.

We’re currently working on Mininova, more news about that is coming up in a few days. Stay tuned for a new blog post!

Silence is Sexy joins Mininova, distributing their new album for free

Published on September 16, 2008 in Mininova-related news and Personal rants. 58 Comments

Hi everybody!

More and more more artists are discovering the benefits of our free Content Distribution (CD) service. Silence is Sexy is the first Dutch rock band to release their complete new album this way. ‘This Ain’t Hollywood’ is a must-download if you are into bands like Radiohead, Editors, Coldplay and Interpol.

An increasing number of music producers see that giving away their content for free is the right way to build a fan-base. These producers are often using Mininova CD to distribute their content to a broad audience. Nowadays more than 750 publishers are actively using Mininova CD to publish content.

By the way, the Silence is Sexy’s first album is also available at our Content Distribution service. We hope a lot more artists will follow this example!

Till next time – the Mininova staff

New statistics and other improvements

Published on August 30, 2008 in Mininova-related news. 23 Comments

Hi everyone!

It’s been a while since we launched our Content Distribution (CD) service. From now on it is more convenient to browse the CD (”featured”) torrents. Like all other torrents, the featured torrents can be browsed by category and subcategory.

Screenshot of the new CD statsEach featured torrent now has its own statistics page (example). This page shows how many times the torrent has been downloaded and from which countries. Similar statistics are also available for the publishers of featured content on their My statistics page.

Moreover, the general website statistics have also been changed. On the Mininova statistics page you can see a detailed overview of the number of downloads, uploads and search queries.

For those who’re wondering: all graphs on the statistics pages mentioned above are generated using the Google Chart API.

Mininova office buildingSome other news: the Mininova team moved into a new office, see the contact page for details. This also means that we will be able to work more efficiently on Mininova and our other projects.

And more things have been improved, including the IRC page. This page now features a live (AJAX) IRC chat window, so you don’t have to install an IRC client to join our channel.

Please let us know if you have more ideas and suggestions.

Cheers! :D

Snotr & Mininova updates

Published on July 28, 2008 in Mininova-related news and Personal rants. 31 Comments

Hi there,

Even though some of us are on holiday we are still working to improve our websites. Here are some features that we have just put live.

Updates for Snotr:

Timelinks
Snotr Timelink

It is now possible to link to a specific time within a movie using the simple minutes:seconds format.

Quotes
Snotr Quote

You can now quote other comments using the #number format.

Flash 9
The Snotr player has been rewritten to Flash 9 so we can support full screen (currently available through right clicking) and HD content.

Improved seeking
It is now possible to seek to a point in the file that isn’t loaded yet.
 

Updates for Mininova:

My Bookmarks
http://www.mininova.org/my/bookmarks is now sortable.

Torrents per tracker
You can now view all torrents from a specific tracker, for example: http://www.mininova.org/tracker/17188. Links to trackers can be found on the torrent details pages.

Improved searching
Searching using quotes (”") and excluding words (-) has now been improved.

On another note, Sphinx, used for Mininova search, is awarded for the SourceForge 2008 Community Choice Awards.

FTP Uploads
FTP Upload

Content Distribution users are now able to use FTP to upload their content. This way they can upload files bigger then 1GB.

Automatic Extracting
CD uploads using .zip or .rar archives are now automatically extracted.
 

As always, we would like to hear your suggestions and ideas for both sites. Please comment on this blog post to share your thoughts.