What's New

Optimising File Sizes for YakShaver

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Lewis Toh

Feb 6, 2025
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2 min

Table of Contents

YakShaver now can process videos greater than 25MB! This means longer and higher quality videos will now be able to be processed through YakShaver, resulting in better quality work items or emails!

Why 25MB limit in the first place?

We are using Azure OpenAI's Whisper AI model, which currently has a 25MB file size limit

Azure OpenAI's Whisper AI model allows you to batch transcribe, why not do that?

Giving no hard limits on the size and truncating the video into 25MB chunks to be batched process is not a great idea in the long run. It can be used to waste a great amount of processing power and can be easily abused to be sent an extremely large file if no checks are in place.

Furthermore, this feature requires your video files to be stored in blob storage, which means greater costs in order to process longer videos.

How did we overcome this 25MB limit?

The short answer is we didn't, we just removed the parts that Whisper doesn't need - the visuals that take up the majority of bytes in a video file.

We use a library that implements FFmpeg in code, called Xabe.FFmpeg, which allows us to manipulate and process media files. By extracting only the audio from the video file, we significantly reduce the size to only have the data that matters for a transcription service, the audio.

Here are some examples of what it has done to the file size before transcription: 1-minute video in 4K - 38.87 MB -> 0.62 MB audio .mp3 (1.5% of the video size) 30-minute video in 2K - 209.89 MB -> 7.95 MB audio .mp3 (3.8% of the video size)

Previous article

Latest

Service incident on 6 August – repeated "Video Process Failed"

On Wednesday 6 August, between 11:00am and approx. 2:45pm AEST, YakShaver sent repeated Microsoft Teams messages "Video Process Failed" to some YakShaver users. We apologize for both the disruption and the volume of unnecessary messages. The YakShaver users that received the messages, previously has used OneDrive during that outage period.

What happened

An internal credential that YakShaver uses to connect to Microsoft 365 expired. On its own, this would have caused a brief interruption to video processing. However, our error handling sent a separate failure notification for every processing attempt rather than a single alert, which turned a routine fault into repeated Teams messages.

Our response

When reports came in, YakShaver engineers immediately engaged SSW SysAdmins and together made a plan of attack. They took the affected services offline within minutes to stop the messages, replaced the credentials, and restored full service by 5:30pm AEST the same day. The platform has operated normally since.

This was not a security incident nor was any data lost

The fault prevented YakShaver's platform from connecting to Microsoft 365; at no point was your data accessed or lost. Your recordings remain in your own Microsoft 365 tenant.

Recordings made during the outage were processed automatically once service was restored. If a shave from Wednesday afternoon has not produced a work item, it can be re-run from the portal, or contact us and we will resolve it for you.

Preventing a recurrence

We have made 2 changes so this can't happen again.

  • Credential renewal has been automated, so an expiry cannot go unnoticed.
  • Error notifications are now rate-limited, so that a platform fault can only ever generate a single alert rather than a stream of them.

We apologize again for the disruption.

If you have any questions, please contact us through yakshaver.ai/docs/support

Kind regards,

YakShaver Team

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Tino Liu

Aug 18, 2026
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3 min
What's New

September Product Updates

Over the last month, the YakShaver team shipped 15 new releases. The biggest changes make it easier to send a report, share a YakShaver Anywhere link, and see what's happening while a report is recorded or processed.

Send a report where it needs to go

YakShaver Anywhere can now send a work item to an email address, alongside its existing destinations. Setting up a GitHub project is easier too: if the connected GitHub app can access a repository, you can find it in a searchable list instead of pasting its URL.

YakShaver Anywhere

Create a project link or QR code and share it with reporters. They can open it on a phone and record a shave with their camera, or upload a video from their device.

The link page is now available in Chinese.

Know what's happening during a report

The browser recorder warns people when a recording has no audio and shows an error if processing fails, rather than a false success message.

On iOS, the embed widget offers video upload when the browser can't record the screen directly.

Reports keep processing if someone closes the tab. If their live connection drops, the page explains that the report is still underway, helping avoid a duplicate submission. The status page also tells reporters where to look for the result.

A few more useful changes

The Integrations page is easier to scan on an iPad. Connection status is more accurate, project links are easier to read, and reporters can add a GitHub handle so issues can mention them.

Releases
  • v0.95.3 — 24 September: Maintenance release.
  • v0.95.2 — 24 September: Maintenance release.
  • v0.95.1 — 22 September: Added Chinese-language support to YakShaver Anywhere links.
  • v0.95.0 — 21 September: Added iOS video upload to the widget and improved embeds.
  • v0.94.5 — 17 September: Maintenance release.
  • v0.94.4 — 17 September: GitHub issues can mention reporters who add their GitHub handle.
  • v0.94.3 — 17 September: Clearer report status, reporter attribution and interrupted-processing messages.
  • v0.94.2 — 16 September: Clearer feedback when a live connection drops, plus a fix for recording preview playback.
  • v0.94.1 — 16 September: Reports keep processing if the reporter closes the browser tab.
  • v0.94.0 — 14 September: Added YakShaver Anywhere links and QR-code reporting, with retry and navigation fixes.
  • v0.93.0 — 10 September: Improved the Integrations page, connection status and recording warnings.
  • v0.92.0 — 7 September: Added a searchable GitHub repository picker, clearer project links, and recording audio and status fixes.
  • v0.91.1 — 1 September: Fixed a blank screen when starting a browser report from the dashboard.
  • v0.91.0 — 31 August: Email became an end-to-end work-item destination.
  • v0.90.1 — 26 August: Email reporting updates.

Want to try YakShaver? Visit yakshaver.ai, open the demo, or follow @yakshaverai.bsky.social on Bluesky.

See you for your next shave. 🐂

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Ian Hoffman

Sep 28, 2026