Angus McIntyre's dashboard

To disable comments, go to: http://blip.tv/prefs/comments/ and uncheck the 'enable comments' box.

That page is actually part of our old dashboard. We haven't quite finished moving everything over to the shiny new dashboard. When we do, comment control will appear under the Settings menu.

Go to http://blip.tv/prefs/showpage/ and choose the player you want to use from the Show Player menu there. Depending on which player you choose, you may also need to make a selection from the 'Player Content' menu underneath to decide what gets shown in that player.

That page is actually in our old dashboard. Once we finish migrating all the functionality from the old dashboard to the new one, these controls will probably show up in the appropriate place under the Settings menu.

Unfortunately, there are some security issues associated with the use of FXP. For this reason, we have no plans to support FXP at this time.

The short answer is ... "Try it and see."

The longer answer is that we support a pretty wide range of video formats: QuickTime, Windows Media, MPEG-4, M4V, AVI, DivX and Ogg Theora should all work. You can also upload your own Flash Video files, as well as MP3 audio files and JPEG images. If you try to upload a file format whose extension we don't recognize, the upload form should give you a warning.

We also support a wide range of audio and video codecs, although occasionally some of the more unusual ones can give our converter trouble. You'll generally only encounter problems if you've installed some high-end video editing package or a specialized tool such as screencast recorders which may install some less common codecs of their own.

If you have any doubts, try making a short test video in the format you prefer and upload that to see how we handle it. If it doesn't work, send us a note through the support form at http://blip.tv/help/ and we'll take a look at it.

Not stupid at all ... we just updated our 'about' page, and the section that included links to the icons has gone missing. We'll need to fix that.

In the meantime, I've added the icons here.

Videos can fail to convert to Flash for various reasons. One is that the video is unusually long, or high-resolution, so that the conversion to Flash took a very long time. In this case, you'll usually see a message on your dashboard saying that the video timed-out during conversion. (In order to ensure that our converters don't get tied up processing enormous files, we put limits on the amount of time that the converter will work on any one file).

If this is the problem, then ways to fix it include (a) reducing the dimensions or length of your video, (b) making your own Flash conversions using free or commercial tools, or (c) upgrading to a pro account.

Another possibility is that the video was saved using an unusual codec (compressor-decompressor). Our converters are pre-loaded with a large number of widely-used codecs, but occasionally we come across one we haven't seen before (or one that we're not able to support for technical reasons). In this case, you'll also get a conversion failure. The fix for this is usually to switch to a different, more commonly-used codec. Or if you're really attached to that codec, send us a note and our conversion guru will see if it's something we can add to the converter.

There are other possibilities: the video might be corrupted in some way (some authoring systems produce videos that don't quite meet the standard), you might have uploaded a QuickTime reference movie rather than the movie itself, and so on.

The best thing to do is to go to http://blip.tv/help and send us a note that includes the URLs of the videos that are giving you problems. We'll take a look, try to figure out what the problem is and let you know what can be done about it.

The inclusion of HTML in the <media:player> element is a feature that's widely supported but not actually part of the standard. We do actually submit the feed at '/rss/itunes' to iTunes. Apparently iTunes is able to handle the non-compliant element in the feed without problems.

If you are using an application that's a little more picky - such as Feedburner - you can use '/rss/itunes-strict' instead. This gives you a feed that conforms more closely to the standard. You may still receive some warnings (mostly to do with namespace issues) if you validate the feed, but they should only be warnings, not errors, and should not cause the feed to be rejected by Feedburner.

Gregg ... does your WordPress blog have a title? There is a known problem with our software that causes it to give this error if your blog is untitled.

It's also possible that you could get this error if the username you provided doesn't have admin privileges. Wordpress will only give a list of hosted blogs if you're an admin. You can check that your user has been assigned the 'Admin' role by going to "Users" in the Wordpress control panel, and clicking 'Edit' next to the username.

As the message says, you'll also get this error if the endpoint, username or password that you provided are wrong.

If none of those cases seem to cover it, please send the URL of your Wordpress blog, the URL of the API endpoint you're using, and your username/password to us through the support form at http://blip.tv/help/ and we'll take a look (we promise not to misuse the information you give us, and you can change your password to something else when we're done).

Writing a good description and adding some well-chosen tags that correctly describe your video will always pay off. We use the tags and description to build the 'meta' information in your episode page, which influences how that page is indexed by search engines.

'Good' descriptions should tell people concisely what your video is about ... and make them want to see it. For the tags, you might want to choose a mix of tags: some that express the ways that your video is like other videos, and others that express the way that your video is unique and different.

Using Twitter, Facebook and other social sites to let your friends know that you've posted a new video is also a good strategy. Not only does it create initial interest, but it makes a link that may lead viewers to your video in future.

A good thumbnail is helpful too: like the description, it should be something that makes a potential viewer want to watch your video. If you don't like the one that we generate for you automatically, make your own and upload it using the Thumbnail control on the edit/upload form.

Getting people to watch your videos is very similar to getting people to visit a web page. It's a kind of search engine optimization (SEO) task. If you search for "seo matt cutts" in Google, you should find lots of pages where Google's Matt Cutts explains how you can do whitehat SEO - making your content easier to find by following standards and providing useful information (the opposite of whitehat SEO is blackhat SEO, which involves trying to trick search engines into indexing your content to your advantage by misleading them). Matt mostly talks about SEO from the point of view of people who are writing web pages, but a good number of his tips will carry across.

Visits to your blog should translate to views of your video, so you want to make it easy for people to find your blog posts too. WordPress has their own guide to Wordpress SEO. If you're hosting your own Wordpress blog (rather than running off wordpress.com), you should definitely enable permalinks.

Your interpretation is correct. WordPress is counting the total number of views of your web page. When we talk about a 'view', we mean that the video was played (to be more precise, we're counting the number of times that our video servers have been asked to send back a copy of your video). So if someone visits your page but doesn't click the play button to play the video, WordPress will record a view (of the page) but we won't count that as a view (of the video).

At the playlists page at http://blip.tv/playlists, you can remove items from your list (by clicking and dragging), change the order of items on the list, or create new playlists. There's no way at the moment to change the name of a playlist, but if you really want to change a playlist name, send us a note through our support form at http://blip.tv/help and we'll take care of it for you.

There's a control to add items to a playlist on each individual episode page on the blip.tv site. If you happen to be looking at a main show page rather than an episode page, you can get to the episode page by clicking the 'Episode Archives' button at the top right of the page.

On the episode page, you'll see a button marked "Add to playlist". Click that, and you'll see a menu of all your available playlists; choose the one you want, click 'Add', and that item will be added to your playlist.

We had some problems with the stats processor at the end of last week. This led to some of the data becoming inconsistent.

We are currently working to correct this issue. In the meantime, please take the lower of the two numbers as the correct value.

I'm sorry, I may have misinformed you; the 'Embed with WordPress' option is needed for manual embeds only. If you're using the automatic cross-post feature, I believe that the Show Player should indeed work.

I'm doing a test now just to confirm this. In the meantime, could you send us a URL that demonstrates the problem you've been having? If you'd prefer not to post the URL in a public forum, you can also send us a note through the blip.tv support form.

Are you cross-posting to a blog hosted on wordpress.com, or to a blog that uses the WordPress engine hosted on a different site?

If you're cross-posting to a blog on wordpress.com, you must use the "Embed with Wordpress.com" option, rather than the "Embed with ShowPlayer" option on the yellow menu on the episode page. This is due to restrictions imposed by wordpress.com for security reasons.

If you're cross-posting to a blog hosted elsewhere, please let us know the URL of a page where we can see the problem, and we'll try to figure out what's going wrong.

You can upload your own thumbnail to use in place of the one that blip picks for you. There's a Thumbnail field on the Upload form that lets you choose an image file to use. To add a new thumbnail to an existing video, just go to your Dashboard and click the edit link next to the name of the video you want to change.

To choose a frame from your video to use as a thumbnail, you might want to use VLC from http://www.videolan.org/. This is a free open-source video player that should probably be part of everyone's video toolkit (versions for PC, Mac and Linux are available).

To make a thumbnail with VLC, just go to the frame that you want and pause the video. Then choose "Snapshot"from the "Video"menu. The thumbnail image will be saved to your hard disk (on Windows, it goes into your My Pictures folder; on Mac I think it either ends up in Pictures or on your desktop) as a file whose name begins with 'vlcsnap-'.

Hi Lanfiex

Ratings are an old feature that used to be supported on the blip.tv site. We found that very few visitors actually rated videos, so when we redesigned the episode pages, we quietly dropped the ratings link. However, as you've seen, there are still some references to ratings in your dashboard.

It's not impossible that we may put some kind of ratings feature back in in future versions of the blip.tv site, but for the moment it isn't a supported feature, and you can ignore any references you see.