New Release - New Media Players & Chat

On February 26th, we’re releasing new video, photos, and music players as well as the major improvements to Chat. There will also be a few more visual changes you may notice as well.

In this release, the video, photos, and music players are getting a new design and a few more features. These new media players should give you even more ways to watch and share your videos, photos, and music or podcasts with each other or across the Internet.

New Video Player

The (high) video quality remains the same and the video player itself has a new design with updated icons and controls. Better yet, the buttons disappear when you move your mouse away from the controls. It will also play related or latest videos in a video playlist available at the end of each video.

New Music Player

Aside from the new visual design it's quick and easy to jump around between songs and playlists are much easier to view and use. You can sort playlists by track number, title, artist, album or by the name of the person who added the track.

And, just as before, you can activate shuffle or repeat mode, change the volume, and rate songs. Your can also pop out the music player into a new window, allowing you to continue listening to uninterrupted music as you browse the network.

New Chat

We’ve retained all the great features you have on chat today, such as private chats, and are adding the following new features:

- Chat will be persistent on every page. With this new release, chat will become a bar across the bottom of every page. It will start in “bar mode” and will expand into “window mode”.

- You will be able to pop chat out and keep it open as its own window.

- Sound notifications when messages are received. Notifications start OFF by default, but can be turned on through the options menu.

- Members will appear online more accurately. However, there will still be the option for a member to make themselves invisible, if they choose.

- Reconnections will be more graceful. When a connection to the server is lost for some reason, chat will attempt to reconnect gracefully without requiring a page refresh, and if possible without affecting the member. There will be no more need to reload the page entirely and lose all your messages.

- Chat will now load the entire scrollable list of people online. No more clicking on ‘More’!. As a result, search will now be faster too.

- Chat will now be in Flash. This means that you need to have a minimum of Flash 9 on your computer. You likely already have Flash 9 and, if not, we’ll have instructions for how to add it.