As you know, web instances don't display video. Perhaps there is information on when full video support is planned?
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You can link to videos if you want. I don't think that lemmy or kbin instances will likely provide free hosting for them, though.
There is a Fediverse service that provides video hosting, PeerTube.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
I'm skeptical that it will scale -- it costs to host video -- but it's there. You can host something on any PeerTube host willing to serve your content and link to it from the Threadiverse, same as you could on YouTube.
EDIT: For a list of nearby instances:
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I would like to add that we are talking primarily about the ability to insert a direct link with a video located on a third-party service. To do this, you need to display previews/thumbnails, which are not available now.
I may be wrong, but I don't think it will require a lot of additional resources.
For the scaling, isn't that mostly for those high availability / high demand content creators?
I mean, for me, Lemmy is a place where you interact, create, discuss. Not a platform where a select few have millions of "followers"?
So I think that bandwidth cost can be not that high for "enthusiast" servers.
Also, say you post a crazy viral video on my poor server, well people could(I know it doesn't work that way automatically today) re-post it elsewhere because they like it and see that it's just not available on my lil server because the hug of death.
Maybe information wants to be free, and if we share things on the internet, we shouldn't think we had a right to control it any more. I mean is there a law against to create something being inspired by something else?
A bit like when you say something interesting to someone, and they repeat it to their friends, and they do the same and so on.
Sorry about the rant, it's just a rant, not anything against you!, thanks for the information you provide.
I'll try hosting video on my ~700Mb up line (IIRC) to see how it works if I get the howtos.
Cheers Lemmings :-)
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I’ll try hosting video on my ~700Mb up line (IIRC) to see how it works if I get the howtos.
It looks like that if you set up a lemmy instance, there's an upload size cap for things that people can attach.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3349
If you set that to some insane number, I imagine that people can upload large stuff, and as I note below, at least webm files seem to be doable right now on lemmy.world (just that the lemmy.world size cap is going to keep someone from uploading anything of meaningful size). I'd imagine that if you lift that cap to whatever you want -- if you want full-length movies, then probably a couple of gigabytes -- the users of your instance should be able to upload. They'd click on "image" rather than "movie", but...shrugs
The Lemmy Web UI isn't really designed for huge uploads, doesn't show a progress bar, so it's probably not going to provide the best user experience, but I'd expect that it'll work.
If you don't want to run a lemmy instance, but do want to permit people to just anonymously upload files that they can link to on other lemmy instances, then while I don't have a particular example ready to hand, I'm sure that there are no shortage of web-based "dropbox" systems that let one upload and then serve files. Just have people reference the file's URL the way they would anything else.
If you want to run a PeerTube instance, which is aimed at fediverse video sharing, then I'd look at their docs. I've never set one up, but I'm sure that they have some kind of documentation.
Hosting videos requires much more storage and performance than text and images. So for most privatly run instances not anytime soon.
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Users can save videos to their cloud services, such as gdrive, and insert a direct link to the video when creating a post.
I don't think that displaying previews of videos hosted on third-party services will take more resources than previews of gif images.
Posts with external video links already have previews. Do you mean in the comments? I'd rather not have that ...
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Are you serious?
This is what it looks like in Jerboa
https://pixshare.de/images/iLzOo8.jpeg
Here's what the video display looks like on web instances.
https://pixshare.de/images/iLzPDJ.jpeg
Well, if you're using a 3rd party app, you need to address that with app developers. Try !jerboa@lemmy.ml
There are previews on the standard desktop web interface.
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If you enable the "PC version" setting in your mobile browser, it looks like this
https://pixshare.de/images/iLKEtn.jpeg
Just a black square.
I'm using the browser version (Firefox on a laptop) and it works for me as well: It has a huge preview and I can watch the actual video without it redirecting me offsite.
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Thanks for the screenshot. I don't have a working laptop right now to check how Lemmy works on PC. I didn't realise that the display of media in the mobile and desktop version could be different. Probably because some people don't use the mobile version there is a misunderstanding and they don't understand what we are talking about.
However, the problem with displaying videos in the mobile version has been around for a long time. Also, after clicking on the dark square that is displayed instead of the preview, you are prompted to open the video in a new tab as if you were opening another site.
Well, all I can say it works for me.
Not sure what frontend you're using or if it is maybe instance depended, but the feature isn't missing from the lemmy core.
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YouTube previews are displayed normally. I suppose this problem occurs only with direct links, example www.site.com/827474/mycats.mp4
As you saw in the screenshots, for the test I used direct links to videos uploaded to reddit and the x0.at service.
I did the test in two different browsers and in two different instances. I've also read in the comments under various video posts that other people are also discovering this problem.
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Do you mean in the comments? I’d rather not have that
https://lemmy.today/comment/4211739
I can see this inline webm hosted on lemmy.world in a comment on the Web UI on lemmy.today. Lemmy.world is gonna have upload size limitations that'll keep that from being used for anything very large, but I assume that as long as someone can find a place to host it, they can embed inline videos, so probably a bit late on that.
Obviously small text messages takes less storage, but as they are more abundant, they can take up more bandwidth (the protocol takes its fair share for everything). And storage maybe (edit: as they are sent around more often)?
We all know that (sort of) texts < jpg < gif < mp3 ...
But one part is storage, a totally other part is bandwidth. Two very different beasts.
I think we can try out video, if it isn't "stupid videos" ("fun" or for angering). Let meta and reddit handle those ones.