Sharemixer www.sharemixer.com is a Youtube clone (video sharing solution) developed in Zagreb, Croatia by a company having over ten years of web development expertise and currently moving to media market.

It has a ton of features too long to be listed here so you can look on their website here.

Sharemixer license cost $199 with one year support, $299 with two years support, $499 with lifetime support and there is special $100 offer for Clipshare owners to migrate to Sharemixer. The license can be also purchased as subscription service for $39 per month.

Their additional services pricelist is long so seems that this company would like to make more money selling services rather than from their software licensing.

Installation and Setup
To use Sharemixer, the hosting service should have Linux, BSD or Apache server with MySql 4.1 running, PHP 4.4.3 and up (including PHP 5) and access to CGI-BIN directory. It should also have FFMpeg with Lame, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder-MPlayer, Rubby on Rails and flvtool2 installed (this extra server-side software is required, to inject meta-data to the converted videos - key-frames, tags, title, etc. FLVTool2 is used for that and it depends on Ruby On Rails to work.). To checkout details of the server requirements please look here.

The MySQL database must be created manually from provided script and the configuration parameters should be configured manually in several files, including assigning proper directory rights so some technical knowledge will be needed to install it.

To migrate from Clipshare you should run a different database script, configure the files and delete some older directories.

Sharemixer user forums are providing exact step to step instructions for the installation and there is also possibility to ask their technical support help.

Their help will be very useful, as I encountered several problems with their installation. The first problem was with license which they had created to run only in particular server and was not transferrable. So, they had created their own testing environment for it where their technical personnel got the product work.

From the Sharemixer control panel, beside site parameters, the administrator can setup which features will be switched on and off. Thos includes showing random video on main page, now playing in main page, video of the day, featured videos, random videos, top video categories and channels, promoted videos, cloud tags, site stats, etc also user rights settings, like who can upload the video, who can view the video, e-mail activation, complete profile registration, etc.

They had even automatic nudity control in Avatar pictures implemented which should be set off, when you want to run an adult site.

Sharemixer seems to support even Arabic language which was unique in the marketplace and is now available in French.

Sharemixer allows unlimited level of paid packages. Those are limited by bandwidth, disk space and optional number of videos for certain subscription period like Year, Month. It integrates only with PayPal payment processor.

Videos can be collected to the user channels and those channels can be featured by administrator. Channels can be public, private or protected.

Video categories can have unlimited depth of subcategories, which was unique but not very useful feature for small portals and can have photo descriptions.

The polls module allows to setup polls appearing in lower right corner of the main screen. Polls can be setup to be active for certain period and only one active poll was allowed.

There was also a limit to setup, how many times one user can rate the video and vote the poll. This could be set as once or unlimited.

The ad management module allows setup Banner (text) ads and Video ads. Banner ads can be setup currently in eight different places in the screen and you need to enter banner ad code, rather than uploading an image.

Video ads can be setup to each category, channel and to each separate videos. Those will play at the begging of the clip.

The Users module will allow seeing their country, last login, package, number of videos, and their status, edit their profile, delete a user and send email to users. Administrators are able to search users by their ID and username.

The video management module will sort videos by public and private, manages feature requests and inappropriate video reports. Administrators are able to delete (not ban) inappropriate videos and either delete requests or change video settings.

Usability
The main page contains your stats, inbox, Now Playing video, last watched, last added, top watched, top rated, top favourites and top discussed videos, Featured Videos, Editors Choice, What’s new, recently used tags, Top video channels and categories and last users online. It was very clean and nice design.

The signup procedure is asking your e-mail address, proposed username and password and image verification. There are no check boxes to check, only the text telling “Upon registration I certify that I’m over 18 years old and agree with terms of service”.

Besides the profile basics info, you can talk more about your school, Interests and Hobbies, Favourite movies, favourite music, and favourite books and write more about yourself using Rich Text editor.

When you are familiar with HTML and CSS you could have possibility to give your page unique look and feel.

Besides uploading your own video, users are able to embedded videos from other video sites such as Youtube. Somehow it didn’t want to accept my Youtube video code but embedding video from OsTube went well. So you can store your videos in different sites to show those in Sharemixer based sites.

After upload users are able also to add additional information to the video, like date, location and country recorded and each video will get their own permalink.

Each video page shows statistics, users are able to rate and comment the video, share it to friends or copy the permalink, bookmark it to blink, del.icio.us, digg, furl, google, simpy, spurl and y!Myweb; feature the video, report abuse, post comments and add to favourites. The page shows related videos and member other videos.

All videos can be listed by Most Recent, Most Viewed, Most Commented, Top Favourites, Top Rated, Recently Featured and adult category from Video page. Those can be viewed as basic or detail view with the description, stats and the screenshots of the video.

The categories section allows sorting by same criteria’s for each category, but had also the category most active user’s box and tag cloud, which was missing in Watch main screen.

Members are able to create their own channels with unique URL. Channels can be public, protected which request the channel owner approval to join and private. Channel can belong to multiple categories. Channel is like a group, which allows forum postings and video uploads. You can select videos from your own uploads to your channel.

The community section allows search from member list which can be sorted by name, date joined, last login, gender, most active and most popular. The list can be limited for members currently online and members with pictures only.

From the community section you can jump to member profiles, showing statistics and last uploaded video, with the options to subscribe user videos, rate user, add to friends and send a private message. User can also see what videos this member has been subscribed, what channels the member is watching, who else are tracking the member videos, the favourite list, friend list, subscriptions and watched videos.

The user interface was little bit funny as some of those functions where tabbed from member profile, some of those where in upper menu options.

The friends section allows seeing your friend list, their videos and favourites. It also allows sending Rich Text email invitations to your friends which were duplicated from the menu option Share.

The main search box will execute keyword search from videos, users and channels by your choice.

Conclusion
Sharemixer is alternative to Clipshare and even sometimes I found the user interface duplicated and confusing, it was nice and clean design. I first evaluated this product around a month ago and lot of promised features (like polls, banner ads, subscription services, etc) where not then implemented in the administration panel.

This company has done lot of work within a month to provide working and leading video hosting platform and have succeeded to convince me at least. Their main market strength is to provide different language versions, which is unique in the marketplace. French and Arabic is currently available, so I would expect Spanish, Polish, Slovak, Italian, etc to be followed soon.

And to see for yourself Sharemixer in action go and check their demo.
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Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

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