Archive for the ‘Zamzar’ Tag
Using the Zamzar Web Browser Button with Google Chrome
Happy 2012 to everyone ! We start the year here at Zamzar HQ with the curious case of the button, the browser and the global international mega-corp …
The Button
The Zamzar Web Browser Button has been around for a few years now, and is the best way of converting your files at the touch of a button from within your web browser. If you don’t have it already stop everything and get it here now !.
The Problem
Recently some of you who use the button reported it isn’t working in the Google Chrome web browser when trying to convert YouTube videos.
We’ve taken a look into this problem and there is a bug in Chrome which is causing this to break. If you want the juicy technical details you can see them here, but in layman’s terms we can tell you:
“Google broke it”.
How to fix it
Fortunately there is a simple way to fix the problem … unfortunately it’s something you need to do rather than us.
Step 1 – Open a new tab in Chrome and click “Apps” at the bottom of the browser
Step 2 – Right click the YouTube app and select “Remove from Chrome”

Step 3 – Click uninstall

Step 4 – Restart the web browser
Step 5 (optional) – Sing joyfully
Hopefully this will help if you come up against the problem whilst we wait for Google to pull their fingers out and fix things in Chrome
We’re improving Zamzar …
Our rocket scientists have been working hard to make Zamzar better for you over the past few months.
Here’s a quick rundown of the things we’ve been fixing in recent months.
If you’ve noticed any other bugs, or want us to improve anything else with the service please let us know.
Conversions
- PDF to JPG – In some cases we noticed that very large files (500+ pages) were failing to convert.
- Keynote to PPT – Some Apple Keynote presentations had issues when being converted into Microsoft Powerpoint.
- DOCX to DOC – Some larger .docx files were failing to convert correctly to the .doc format.
Note: We’re still aware of an issue whereby some files with a non-Latin alphabet fail to convert. Our engineers are working to fix this. - PDF to XLS – A bug in our conversion process caused a number of these conversions to fail. We’ve now fixed this to improve conversion success for these files by over 40%
- PUB to PDF – Files with very long filenames were failing, an issue which we’ve now fixed.
Video conversions
We fixed an issue which had been preventing video file conversions from the popular video sharing website at GodTube. Yay !
Notification Emails
- Delivering to your inbox – We’ve improved the way we send email notifications for conversions so that less of them end up in your spam folders.
- Look & Feel – In some email providers (most notably Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail) Zamzar conversion emails looked wonky. We’ve now tidied them up to look all nice and shiny.
New Zamzar Status Page
Thanks to our friends at Pingdom we’ve been able to create a new Zamzar service status page so you can keep an eye on how well the main Zamzar website is holding up under all your conversions.
You can view detailed stats on uptime, response time and performance from various countries.
Over time we’d like to add more data to the page – what would you like to see ?
Enough ! No more pop-under ads
We know that many of you have found the pop-under advertisements that run on Zamzar annoying:

Up until now we’ve been willing to put up with them, as they have provided much needed revenue for the business, and generally speaking if you were determined enough to block them you could.
However, we’ve decided that enough is enough – Ads we’ve seen recently have been obnoxious, distracting, misleading and downright annoying.
We are therefore very pleased to announce that we are removing pop-under ads from Zamzar for all users effective immediately
Say goodbye to this:

Phew !
Convert PS files to BMP, GIF, JPG, PDF, TIFF
A common request we’ve had at Zamzar is to convert PostScript (.ps) files into PDF. We’re pleased to announce that our engineers have now enabled this, and a whole raft of other formats too !
You can now convert .ps files from their native Postscript format into any one of the following formats:
- bmp – Windows bitmap
- gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
- jpg – JPEG compliant image
- pdf – Portable Document Format
- thumbnail – Thumbnail image
- tiff – Tagged image file format
Why not head over to Zamzar to try it out now ?
If you have suggestions for any other formats you’d like to see us support just get in touch with us at support@zamzar.com.
Improved Conversion Quality – PDF to JPG, PDF to BMP
We are always striving to improve the quality of our conversions here at Zamzar. Today we’re pleased to announce that as part of this effort we have rolled out a new way of converting PDF to image formats.
These improvements will result in …
- Less failures
- Greater conversion clarity
- Provide the opportunity to either download a zip file containing all of the images from the converted PDF document or just individual images
Why not head over to Zamzar to try these out now ?
Zamzar nominated for HSBC 2010 European Business Awards
We’re delighted to announce that Zamzar has been selected for inclusion in the 2010 European Business Awards sponsored by HSBC.
The European Business Awards recognises and promotes excellence, best practice and innovation in the European business community. The Awards uncover and promote examples of individuals, and organisations that have achieved outstanding results setting them apart as the leading companies, business leaders and entrepreneurs in Europe.
Awards mean nothing without you guys though – We want to say a huge thanks to all of you who use Zamzar and have supported us since we first launched back in October 2006. We recognise that there’s still room to improve though. and we have a lot of great new features and conversions in the pipeline for you – stay tuned for further updates
Convert PDF to DOC – better quality conversions
More good Zamzar news – we’ve improved the quality of all our PDF to DOC (MS Word) conversions.
Converting from Adobe’s PDF format to Microsoft Word’s DOC format is handy as it can allow you to make changes to otherwise un-editable PDF documents. We’ve made the following updates to Zamzar:
- Wider support for different PDF versions
- Improved results for documents with complex tables
- Better recognition of paragraph alignments
Why not try out these new conversion capabilities on the Chuck Norris factbook PDF ?
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