With the release of Jamroom 6.1 we changed a number of things internally with the Video module that affected how video files were converted and stored - many of you know this since one of the steps for upgrading to Jamroom 6.1 is to run the new "Verify Video Files" tool in the video module. This tool goes through the existing videos and rebuilds and renames files so that going forward there is better video support on a wider array of devices and browsers.
One of the challenges we were running into was trying to support both Jamroom 6.1+ as well as 6.0.7 (and older) installs of Jamroom using the Conversion service for media encoding. This proved to be much more problematic than we had anticipated in our pre Jamroom 6.1 testing, and the only good solution would have been to build a second cluster specifically for Jamroom 6.1+ installs.
After analyzing the Conversion server usage over the past month, it became clear that only a small handful of Hosted users were utilizing the conversion service on their site, so the decision was made to shut down the conversion cluster and move the media conversions back to the hosted server.
For most of you, this is going to have no impact on your site - you already were not using the Conversion service, or the number of audio or video files being encoded was very, very small. For those of you that could be impacted by this change, I have already personally contacted you by email and given you a heads up on this change.
Taking away a "feature" is not something we are used to doing - in fact I'm not sure we've ever done it before. While you may not have been currently using the service, the fact that it was featured as part of our hosting product means you might have - and so I have to apologize for shutting the service down. It wasn't a decision that was made lightly - we have been deliberating this for several days, but ultimately we'd prefer to spend our development and support time on features and updates that the majority of our users can utilize and enjoy.
Please let me know if you have any feedback or concerns. If you are worried that your existing hosting server may not be up to media conversion tasks in the future, and you were planning on using the conversion service, please contact us - we want to make sure you are happy with Jamroom Hosted and will work with you to come up with a good solution.
Thanks everyone!
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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 04/18/18 07:05:54PM
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