New feature: set titles and descriptions on uploaded files.

Today is MediaCrush's first birthday! We want to take this opportunity today and every year going forward to give everyone some insight into how MediaCrush is doing and where we've gone in the past year.

Starting today, you're able to request zip files of albums. Hit the "Download Album" button on any album page to request a zip file, which may take a couple of minutes to put together. If you aren't the first person to ask for a zip of that album, then you'll just get it right away.

Hello! Here's April's transparency report. Sorry it's a bit late, we've been rather busy! This is the first month that we have been running ads on MediaCrush. You can read more about our choices here.

One million visitors!

We built this for fun this morning:

We pushed support for better albums this morning. The size limit for an album has been raised to 1024 items per album, and we improved the UI as well to support larger albums. Additionally, we've added a new album layout (switch with the buttons on the top-right of any album), and opened the door for more to come. Speaking of which, if you'd like to see some more layouts, why not flex your programming muscles and contribute to the open-source project?

Hey there! Finished up this month's reporting. Here's a fun fact: during this month, more people visited MediaCrush than make up the population of the 63 least populous countries.

We have just finished rolling out support for video with subtitles and closed captioning, for the sake of our hard-of-hearing and monolingual friends. We now support subtitles in the SRT, WebVTT, and SSA formats (the three most common), so if you upload a video with embedded subtitles, you'll now be able to use the settings on the bottom-right of each video to turn them on and off.

MediaCrush is now operating a hidden service for TOR users. You can access it here: http://mediacrs5ujufxog.onion

Good websites are designed that way from the start. MediaCrush has been built to scale since day one, and we'll tell you why our system survived today's unexpected surge of traffic - without much effort on our parts.

You may have noticed a little microphone icon on MediaCrush for the past few weeks. You might have even clicked it, and if so, this article will tell you nothing new. For the uninquisitive among you: we have added support for uploading audio directly from your microphone!

Hello! We've been a little behind on our reports again, I apologize for that. However, we have today's report for you. There's one new expense to consider: Amazon CloudFront. We've been experimenting with CDN solutions to serve media faster. We are able to turn CloudFront on and off as need be to control expenses.

Greetings! I've prepared the last report of 2013, a little later than usual. Thanks for being patient! I'd like to extend a special thanks to one very generous donor who single-handledly paid for nearly all of our operating costs this month. Thank you!

Hey guys! Quick blog post to let you know about an update we pushed - we have rewritten our website with "CoffeeScript", and in doing so, made some better choices than the first time we wrote it. Things won't feel much different, but you should notice that the site is more snappy and interactive, and works more consistently.

Hey! We recently discovered a vulnerability that allowed an attacker to send a user a link that once clicked would result in the file being deleted without asking for confirmation. Unfortunately we had to make a breaking change to the API in order to fix this. If you have built an application that uses the delete API, you might have to make some changes to your application. However, if you use the official wrappers it will just be a matter of updating them; we have updated PyCrush. If you use mediacrush.js, you will not need to make any changes unless you're serving a copy manually.

Hi there! We deployed a quick update here at MediaCrush, just in time for Christmas. Now, when you upload any video file (including GIFs!), you get the option to change some settings on them!

The title of this might be a little misleading, since I'm also going to go into detail on how MediaCrush handles video, audio, and arbitrary image formats for display on the web. This is a technical article - if you're not a hacker, don't feel bad for not understanding it.

Starting today, MediaCrush supports over 500 different media formats. This includes everything we already supported and more. Some of my favorite new formats are lossless audio (like FLAC), and more video formats (like MKV and WMV), or more vector graphics, and raw photographs. We'll also take more kinds of audio, like raw PCM data. Odds are, for any particular media format, we'll support it. Want to give it a try?

Earlier today, we removed all advertising from MediaCrush. We were issued a notice by AdSense telling us that our site was a violation of their terms by showing ads alongside mature content uploaded by our users. Rather than remove the offending content, we decided to re-evaluate our use of AdSense in the first place.

Hey guys! Record breaking month here at MediaCrush. We've made double our previous ad revenue (thanks for turning off adblock, it helps a lot). We also hit a new record for daily uniques - there were 20,314 uniques yesterday. We've also switched hosts. We are no longer hosted on AWS - we're on Voxility now. Our hosting is cheaper and much more powerful, on a burly 8 core machine that does GIF and video processing much faster. We also pay less for it, and it's not in the US, for some privacy-related peace of mind. We also lost less money this month than every other - we're approaching sustainability. Here's this month's reports:

A little background: MediaCrush is an open-source website for hosting media - images, video, and audio. I made this website with my friend jdiez over the course of the past few months. Here's how it all started, four months ago:

After a bunch of work last week, we're proud to reveal our latest feature: albums! It's now possible to use MediaCrush to create albums of HTML5'd gifs, images, videos, and audio to share with your friends.

Starting today, Windows users can share pictures, audio, and video in moments, with no hassle, on the best hosting service around.

Hey there! Got the October reports for you. Thanks a bunch to our donors for supporting us this month!

Feel like your website could use some videos, or perhaps an audio player? Or maybe you're building some forum software and you want to allow users to upload videos/audio/pictures without building out all the hosting and encoding in the backend.

Hey there! Got the September reports for you. Sorry this one comes a couple days late. Remember, if you want to improve these numbers, the best way is to tell your friends about MediaCrush.

Starting today, you can now paste images into MediaCrush to upload them!

You may have noticed that we recently added a new feature: remembering your uploads. From this point on, if you upload a file, your computer will remember that you uploaded it. This is important: we do not store your uploads on our servers, it's all stored on your own computer. This keeps your uploads private. If you do not want to remember them anyway, that's fine, too. You can disable this feature at any time. You are also able to remove specific items from your history, or clear it all out at once.

As some of you may have noticed in our July financial report, we spent a little bitcoin on an infographic. Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance to really promote MediaCrush with it. We don't want all that effort to go to waste, so, without further ado, here is the infographic:

NSDex has graciously offered us a logo! I was about to go find and pay a designer, but he was nice enough to give us this great logo for free. In the past he also made logos for a few of my other open source projects.

tl;dr: MediaCrush hosts images, video, and audio for you and takes your privacy seriously. It's like imgur or minus, plus videos and audio, plus privacy.

If you aren't familiar with MediaCrush, a quick introduction: MediaCrush is a media hosting website designed for speedy hosting, without sacrificing quality. We run uploaded static images through various lossless compression tools, but the big draw is our GIF support. Whenever you upload a gif to MediaCrush, we convert it to a video using h.264 and Theora to encode it, which gets us dramatically smaller files. More details are available on the about page. You might also check out this corresponding post aimed at non-technical users. In addition to GIFs and static images, we also support video and audio uploads.