Tag: Zamzar

Drag & drop file uploads, faster file conversions

by The Zamzar Team Leave a comment

We’re pleased to announce that you can now use Zamzar to convert your files faster and more easily – Here’s what you can now do:

Drag & Drop Your Files !

 
We’ve upgraded our upload tool so that you can now drag & drop multiple files into the main window rather than having to select them individually – this is especially handy if you have lots of files to convert at once.

Drag and drop files to convert

 

Multiple File Select

 
You can still use the file picker tool if you want but we’ve upgraded that too, so that you can select multiple files there as well (using ⌘ on Mac, or shift on Windows):

Multi file select

 

Faster Conversions

 
We’ve also improved our conversion process to give you even faster conversions – When you upload multiple files we now start converting as soon as each file has uploaded (as the other files upload in the background). We report the status of these conversions back to you in the progress column of the status window:

Faster file conversions with Zamzar

Why not try out the shiny new upload & conversion process today ?

Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.

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Why Zamzar is supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

by The Zamzar Team Leave a comment

EFF logoWe’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.


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Downloading YouTube videos – no longer supported

by The Zamzar Team 104 Comments

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.

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Using the Zamzar Web Browser Button with Google Chrome

by The Zamzar Team Leave a comment

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🙂

Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.

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We’re improving Zamzar …

by The Zamzar Team 4 Comments

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.

    Happy converting,
    The Zamzar Team.

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    Sharing a file – introducing FilePigeon

    by The Zamzar Team 1 Comment

    Sharing a fileWe’re delighted to announce a new web service from the creators of Zamzar – FilePigeon gives you a super simple way of sharing any file with friends and colleagues without needing to worry about email limits on attachments.

    Are you fed up with:

    • Not having a simple way of sharing files with friends & colleagues ?
    • Unhelpful email limits on file attachments ? (Yahoo, AOL and GMail all limit you to just 25 MB)
    • Waiting around for other file sending services who delay file downloads ?
    • Annoying adverts on web pages which host your files for colleagues ?

    Well FilePigeon is the answer ! It’s is a really simple way to send large files – no signup is needed (it’s free !), so you can start using it straight away. Uploaded files are hosted on our secure servers and a file download link is sent via email to whoever you want to share your files with. You can also share the link on FaceBook and Twitter.

    FilePigeon gives you:

    • A free file sharing service without the need to register
    • No ads for any users
    • Fast uploads & downloads
    • Full drag & drop support for all users
    • Download files as many times as you want (no restrictions !)
    • Send files up to 1GB in size with an account
    • Send files securely (over SSL) with a business account
    • Oodles of storage and an inbox to manage files with an account

    Go try out FilePigeon today ! We’d love to hear what you think.

    Happy sending,
    The Zamzar (FilePigeon) Team.

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    New Zamzar Status Page

    by The Zamzar Team 1 Comment

    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 ?

    Happy converting,
    The Zamzar Team.

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