Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category
Convert multilingual filenames with Zamzar
Filed under: Announcements, News | Tags: convert multilingual filenames, convert utf8
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We’re pleased to announce that we have just added support to Zamzar for filenames from all of the world’s major languages.
This means you can now convert your files regardless of whether they are named in Russian or Hebrew, Greek or Swedish … and pretty much any other language you can think of (Esperanto anyone ?).
We hope this helps make converting your files even easier 
Convertissez vos fichiers maintenant – en ligne et gratuit!
Konvertera dina filer nu – online och gratis!
Konvertieren Sie Ihre Dateien jetzt – online und kostenlos!
Convertire i file ora – online e gratis!
Convierte tus archivos ahora – en línea y gratis!
Преобразование файлов теперь – онлайн и бесплатно!
แปลงไฟล์ของคุณตอนนี้ – ออนไลน์และฟรี!
המר קבצים שלך עכשיו – האינטרנט ובחינם!
Μετατρέψτε τα αρχεία σας τώρα – σε απευθείας σύνδεση και δωρεάν!
تحويل الملفات الآن – على الانترنت ومجانا!
今あなたのファイルを変換する – オンラインで無料！
转换您的文件 – 在线免费 !
Go convert your file now !
The Zamzar Team.
Why Zamzar is supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Filed under: Announcements, News | Tags: EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Zamzar
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We’re pleased to announce today that Zamzar has made a significant contribution in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the world-leading organization which defends free speech, privacy and innovation online.
The EFF is renowned on the web for taking on the kind of David v Goliath cases that others shy away from – Since they were founded in 1990 the EFF has represented ordinary people against the likes of the U.S Department of Justice, MGM, Sony BMG and Apple. They fight on behalf of the average person to protect the freedom which we have grown accustomed to on the Internet.
We’re no strangers to online bullies here at Zamzar, having recently been threatened with legal action by Google and we are proud to be able to help the EFF continue the fight against big government and overzealous corporations.
The EFF is a non-profit organization and depends entirely on public support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. If you want to join us in helping why not donate to the EFF today ?
The Internet stands for freedom – let’s keep it that way.
Thanks,
The Zamzar Team.
Convert TS to AVI, FLV, MOV, MP4 and MPG amongst others
Filed under: Announcements, Conversions | Tags: convert HDTV files, convert ts files, convert ts to avi, convert ts to mp4, convert ts to mpeg
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You can now convert .TS files to other popular video formats using Zamzar – we are delighted to announce support for this brand new conversion. The popular TS format is used to encode HDTV broadcasts – we have had a lot of requests from people who are looking for a simple way to convert these files into a more useable format. We’re pleased to say that we’ve now enabled this and you can now use Zamzar to convert TS files into a bunch of video and audio formats, including AVI, FLV, MOV, MP4 and MPG !
People want their formats to be in a more standard form with the ability to play them on a multitude of devices – with this new enhancement you can now play the TS file on your iPhone, iPad, PC or Mac – enjoy !
See the list of supported conversions that we now support from TS below :
- 3gp – 3GPP Multimedia File
- 3g2 – 3GPP2 Multimedia File
- aac – Advanced Audio Coding File
- ac3 – AC3 Audio File
- avi – Windows video file
- flac – Free Lossless Audio Codec
- flv – Flash video
- gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
- iPad – MPEG-4 (H264) Video File
- iPhone – MPEG-4 (H264) Video File
- iPod – MPEG-4 Video File
- mp3 – Compressed audio file
- mov – Apple QuickTime Movie
- mp4 – MPEG-4 Video File
- mpg – Moving Picture Experts Group File
- ogg – Ogg Vorbis Compressed Audio File
- wav – Windows audio file
- webm – Multimedia Container Format
- wmv – Windows Media Video
We hope this new feature will help all of you who have been stuck looking for a way to convert your TS files into both video and audio.
Don’t take our word for it – Go try it out for yourself today !
Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.
Convert files from DOCX to JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PNG and many more
Filed under: Announcements, Conversions | Tags: convert docx, docx to bmp, docx to gif, docx to jpg, docx to png
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We are delighted to announce that we have extended our support for DOCX files so that you can now use Zamzar to convert DOCX files into a bunch of new image formats, including JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF and PNG !
Many people find it handy to convert their documents into images – not least for easily embedding document content within web pages. Previously we supported the conversion of older Microsoft Word (1997 – 2003) document files into image formats but not newer Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Word 2010 versions – we’re now pleased to say that you can convert these too. For all DOCX files we now support conversion to:
- bmp – Windows Bitmap
- doc – Microsoft Word Document
- gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
- jpg – JPEG compliant image
- mp3 – Compressed audio file
- odt – OpenDocument Text Document
- pcx – Paintbrush Bitmap Image
- pdf – Portable Document Format
- png – Portable Network Graphic
- ps – Postscript document
- tiff – Tagged image file format
- thumbnail – Thumbnail image
- txt – Text document
We hope this new feature will help all of you who have been stuck looking for a way to convert your shiny new DOCX files into images.
Don’t take our word for it – Go try it out for yourself today !
Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.
Use Zamzar to convert XLR to XLS, XLSX, PDF and more
You can now use Zamzar to convert XLR files into a variety of different file formats, including XLS, XLSX, PDF and more !
Microsoft no longer support XLR files or Works Spreadsheet or Chart file’s as they may more commonly be known in their latest versions of Microsoft Office – both Office 2007 and Office 2010. We here at Zamzar receive requests everyday for new conversion types and we are delighted to announce that we can now support conversion of XLR files. You can now convert these to :
- csv – Comma Separated Values
- html – Hypertext Markup Language
- mdb – Microsoft Access Database
- ods – OpenDocument spreadsheet
- pcx – Paintbrush Bitmap Image
- pdf – Portable Document Format
- ps – Postscript document
- rtf – Rich Text Format
- xls – Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet
- xlsx – Microsoft Excel 2007 Spreadsheet
- xml – Extensible Markup Language
We hope these will help all of you who have been stuck looking for a way to convert your XLR files after upgrading to the new version of Office.
Don’t take our word for it – Go try it out for yourself today !
Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.
Downloading YouTube videos – no longer supported
We have received a notice from Google requesting that Zamzar stops offering users the ability to download video files from YouTube, as this is in apparent violation of YouTube’s terms of service. Unfortunately this means we have been left with no choice but to cease to offer video downloads from YouTube via Zamzar with immediate effect.
Zamzar will continue to function as normal for all other conversions. We will continue to offer support for the conversion of hundreds of different file formats that are relied upon by thousands of people everyday. We are also planning to expand the number of conversions on offer and will be developing a range of exciting new features over the coming weeks and months.
We realise that the ability to download and view YouTube videos locally will be missed by many of you (especially teachers), and we’re sorry we can’t do more to support this – Unfortunately this decision was taken out of our control:
Zamzar has been around for over 5 years, we know many of you love using the service, and we have received the odd comment that we’ve saved lives (ok not literally!) We hope you will continue to use Zamzar for all your file conversion needs.
Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.
Open Old Powerpoint Presentations in Office 2007 and Office 2010
Filed under: Announcements, Conversions | Tags: office2007, office2010, old powerpoint, old ppt, Powerpoint
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Zamzar now allows you to open old Powerpoint presentations in Office 2007 and Office 2010, by converting them to a more up-to-date format. No longer should you have to see the horrible error:
The Problem (Microsoft)
We often receive emails requesting support for a new conversion type or help with problems converting a tricky file – we read every one, and try our best to help where we can, but it’s not every day that the inventor of one of those file formats emails us …
Two weeks ago we received an email from Robert Gaskins. Robert is widely credited as having been part of the team which invented PowerPoint back in the mid 1980s. He lead the team at Forethought Inc that received venture capital investment from Apple Computing and which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft who now own the product that is installed on over 1 billion computers worldwide and is a standard for presentations from Tibet to Timbuktu.
Robert suggested there were a large number of people (himself included), who had older Powerpoint presentations that wouldn’t open in the newer versions of Microsoft Office (2007 and 2010), instead receiving the following error:
![PowerPoint can't open the type of file represented by [FILENAME]](http://zamzar.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/open_old_powerpoint_file.jpg?w=480&h=174 "PowerPoint can't open the type of file represented by [FILENAME]")
Microsoft Madness
This problem seems to be caused by 2 acts of Microsoft madness:
- In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft deliberately disabled support for many older file formats and provided 2 mind-boggling complex workarounds(here and here).
- Perhaps even more annoyingly for users, Microsoft doesn’t support opening older (’95 and ’97) versions of Powerpoint files in Office 2007 and 2010.
The Solution (Zamzar)
Robert asked if there was anything we could do to help, and we’ve worked hard to come up with a solution – We’re pleased to announce that from today if you have a Microsoft Powerpoint file older than 1997 that doesn’t open in Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 or Microsoft Powerpoint 2010 you can now use Zamzar to convert it into a 1997-2003 version of Powerpoint which makes it compatible with the latest 2007 and 2010 versions of Powerpoint.
You can convert files from such ancient versions of PowerPoint as v3.0 – released 20 years ago in 1992 !
Just select “ppt (1997-2003)” as the “to” format in Step 2 of your conversion on Zamzar:
Thanks to Robert for bringing this to our attention – we hope this helps. If anyone else has any new suggestions for help with your file format problems do get in touch !
Happy Presenting !
The Zamzar Team
High speed downloads for all Zamzar subscribers
Filed under: Announcements, Features | Tags: cloudfront, download, high speed
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We’re excited to announce the launch of high speed downloads for converted files for all Zamzar subscribers.
If you signup, you can now download converted files from Zamzar up to 5 times quicker than previously. This applies to any newly converted file, and also any file you have already converted.
If you’re still a free Zamzar user, what are you waiting for ? Sign up today to experience this high-speed goodness !
What do you get ?
Benefits for our subscribers include:
- Super fast downloads – We use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to give you high speed downloads
- More reliable downloads – No more annoying “download interrupted” messages
- Better safety for your data – Files are now backed up across multiple devices in multiple secure datacenters
Fast. Very Fast.
If we applied this speed increase to other areas of human endeavour:
- Running the 100 metres would take 1.9 seconds
- You could travel to the moon in half a day (Apollo 11 took 3 days 4hours)
- Formula One cars would travel at over 1000 miles per hour
If you’re already a Zamzar subscriber why not go convert a file now to try it out, or if you want to dig deeper read on to understand all the geeky details of how we did this …
The Geeky Details
Still with us ? Ok, so to achieve this speed increase our engineers have taken advantage of some technical wizardry from the folks at Amazon.com.
All converted files from Zamzar account holders are now stored in a highly secure Content Delivery Network provided by Amazon – This network (known as CloudFront) employs a network of edge locations that cache copies of files closer to wherever you guys are on the internet.
CloudFront then ensures that any download requests for those files are served by the closest edge location. As a result, requests travel shorter distances which means that file downloads get delivered to you far more quickly.
This means that if you happen to be located in a picturesque city such as Frankfurt instead of your computer having to send requests across the Atlantic to download a file from Zamzar:
… you now automatically get the file from a server nearby:
CloudFront has effectively given Zamzar edge locations all over the globe, from San Jose to Singapore, so no matter where you are you should see a significant boost in performance:
We hope you enjoy these improvements, all of which are available immediately.
Happy Converting (and downloading !)
The Zamzar Team.
Convert files by email
Filed under: Announcements, Features | Tags: convert files email
Comments (2) 
We’re really excited to announce a brand new feature which allows you to convert files by email.
Instead of using the Zamzar website to convert files you can send files from your email account to:
format @zamzar.com
(e.g. pdf@zamzar.com, gif@zamzar.com etc)
… we’ll convert them in lightning quick speed and email back a link to your converted file.
So what’s the beef ?
Let’s look at what you can do:
- Email any file which is a supported “from” format on our conversion types page to the format you want it converted to – For example to convert a PDF into a Word Doc (.doc file) email your PDF file to doc@zamzar.com
- Forward email which has been sent by friends and colleagues to the email address of the format you want it converted to.
- Send multiple files in the same email message for conversion (as many as you want if they are within the size limits)
- Convert an email attachment into multiple different formats, by specifying multiple “to” addresses (e.g. jpg@zamzar.com, gif@zamzar.com).
- Convert files sent to your iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry directly from your mobile device using email.
- Convert videos into a format you can watch directly on your iPad or iPhone using our new streaming support.
You can read more about the details of this new service on our FAQ page.
Any limits ?
Most email clients only allow you to send attachments up to 25 MB in size, so limits for the size of file you can email us to convert are less than on the main Zamzar site. At the time of launch they are as follows (per file, not per message):
Free Service – up to 1 MB
Basic Plan – up to 5 MB
Pro Plan – up to 15 MB
Business Plan – up to 25 MB
Email and the dinosaurs
Email is old, maybe as old as the dinosaurs.
Even though many of us have a love / hate relationship with email, we all use it to stay connected. Here are some interesting statistics:
- If email was a country, its 1.4 billion users would make it the largest in the world. Bigger than China, bigger than the USA and EU combined.
- 247 billion emails are sent each day, or one every 0.00000035 seconds.
- In the time it takes you to read this sentence, some 20 million emails entered cyberspace.
Even if you send us just one email we’d be delighted. We’d also scan it for attachments and convert them.
We hope you like the new service
Happy email converting !
The Zamzar Team.
Stream converted videos and audio to your iPhone, iPad and iPod
Filed under: Announcements, Features | Tags: mobile, stream convert video audio ipad iphone ipod
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We’re excited to announce that you can now use Zamzar to stream converted video and audio files to your iPhone, iPad and iPod.
So if you get stuck in a hole with an odd format you need to view whilst you’re out and about you can just “Zamzar it” into a format which you can stream immediately.
We even offer optimised output formats for different devices – just select “iPhone”, “iPad” or “iPod” as the to format for your conversion and if it’s a video file we’ll make sure it looks great on screen for you:
Why not check it out ? Maybe you want to listen to a famous Winston Churchill speech or view a trailer about a rabbit with attitude.
As more people switch to using mobile devices to view and interact with their files we hope this is a useful addition to your toolkit.
We also have more exciting mobile announcements just around the corner – stay tuned !
Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.
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