Veoh blocks all but 33 countries
After the demise of Stage 6 and the disappearance of its unofficial successor Vreel it became apparent that it is difficulty to run a profitable video streaming portal. Veoh seems to be the next company that is realizing that providing a service to a worldwide audience can have a negative impact on bandwidth costs and advertising revenues. This might have been the reason why they decided to block access to Veoh to all but 33 countries.
NewTeeVee has a list of countries that are blocked currently taken from the Wikipedia entry. If you do the math you notice that many countries are still missing on that list. If you sum it up you could say that access is blocked for most countries in Africa, Central and South America, Eastern Europe and Asia.
The first reason that was given to the public was that access was blocked due to a low concentration of users in those countries. According to official sources all blocked countries accounted for 10% of the Veoh user base. It probably makes sense from a business point of view to concentrate on markets that provide a large enough user base to be attractive to advertisers but the way the news was transmitted to the user base was rather unprofessional.
I suppose you could still try and access Veoh using a virtual private network connection like Hotspot Shield if you really wanted to.
Update on Vreel: (received via email)
The vreel servers were hosted in Houston's DC1 datacenter, owned by the planet - which caught fire on saturday :)
Following a flurry of failed repairs, theplanet has finally agreed under immense pressure to move our servers to another datacenter.
We should be back up shortly, and are about ready to enter open beta.
Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?