Phanfare upgrades video capabilities

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Phanfare upgrades video capabilities (UPDATED)
By Mike Tomkins
(Monday, November 16, 2009 - 16:01 EST)

Photo and video hosting service Phanfare has announced an overhaul of its video functionality, including an updated player and HD video support.

According to a post on the company's official blog, the new player is available to all customers, and automatically hides its controls when not needed, as well as offering full-screen playback. The high definition video capability is only available for customers with Pro-level accounts, and allows streaming of three megapit per second video at 720p resolution, with the player taking advantage of hardware acceleration where provided by the viewer's graphics card. Other newly added features available to all customers include support for video transfer to Phanfare (including HD video) using Eye-Fi cards, AVCHD file support, an increased player size at all quality levels, new controls for switching video quality, a new embedded video player for use with blogs, and an improved Facebook video transfer function.

Existing Phanfare accounts are having their videos automatically converted to support the new features, a process expected to take around two weeks. Customers who have already uploaded HD video to Phanfare for archival will find that video is automatically converted to display in HD if they upgrade to a Phanfare Pro account.

More details on Phanfare's service can be found on theÂ Phanfare website.

UPDATED 2009-11-17 11:12ET: Added Phanfare's official press release.

Original Source Press Release:

Phanfare Introduces HD Video Support to its Popular Photo and Video Hosting System

Secure, Ad-Free, Full-Screen HD Video on the Web with Archival Preservation

Princeton, NJ (November 17, 2009) - Archival photo and video hosting company Phanfare (www.phanfare.com) today introduced High Definition (HD) video on the web, allowing consumers to share and archive 720p HD video with friends and family. Video is presented full screen, without advertisements.

"So many cameras shoot HD video today in a great variety of formats.
The challenge becomes sharing them securely with friends and family while preserving them for future generations" said Andrew Erlichson, Phanfare's co-founder and CEO. "The magic of Phanfare is that you can upload just about any HD video file, right off your camera, and we will do all the necessary transformations to show it on the web without advertising on your own personal photo and video website."

Phanfare supports videos up to 2 gigabytes in size and up to 20 minutes in length. Phanfare transcodes the video from nearly all current digital SLR, point and shoot and HD video cameras. Phanfare retains multiple versions of the video including HD versions of the video at Amazon's S3 cloud storage service, which can be downloaded at any time. Phanfare displays lower resolution versions of the video for slower connections.

Phanfare can transfer videos directly to Facebook as well as embed videos within web pages and blogs. Users can organize videos with Phanfare's desktop clients and synchronize videos wirelessly to an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch using Phanfare Photon.

HD video is part of Phanfare's ad-free, archival photo and video hosting service aimed at amateur and professional photographers. Phanfare subscribers can also upload photos and videos from their computer, from Apple iPhoto, Google Picasa, Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture.

Phanfare is fully integrated with Eye-Fi wireless SD memory cards for photo and video transfer. Photos and videos can be shared via email, on the web, or pushed to Facebook. Phanfare securely stores over 170 terabytes of user data and serves over 500,000 people per month.

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