[Freedombox-discuss] youtube and twitter freedombox appearance
J.B. Nicholson
jbn at forestfield.org
Sun Nov 11 20:18:47 GMT 2018
ni nhar wrote:
> freedombox should have its own appearance on youtube. The video on
> freedombox.org should be on youtube.
Your suggestion is a little unclear to me and didn't come with a rationale.
Would you mind explaining why should the video
(https://freedombox.org/FreedomBoxSetuplVideo2018.webm) be on YouTube?
Are you suggesting this video be moved from where it currently is (so
website visitors are given a pointer to the YouTube copy only) or be copied
to YouTube (where YouTube is a secondary source but primarily the video
comes from the website as it currently does)?
> And videos other have made if no license restrictions and
> freedombox thinks they are good.
I don't know that nobody has uploaded a copy of FreedomBox videos to
YouTube. But if nobody has, is there some reason to believe that video
quality is the reason why nobody has uploaded FreedomBox videos (such as
https://freedombox.org/FreedomBoxSetuplVideo2018.webm) to YouTube?
I can think of qualities that tell me the current video distribution
mechanism (a WebM video hosted on the site and included in the webpage via
the HTML video element) is desirable and recommendable. In no particular
order, here are some of the qualities that come to my mind:
- the current video is a WebM file with VP8 video and Vorbis audio. This
works well across modern browsers. Uploading this to YouTube will mean
letting YouTube distribute a needlessly re-encoded video which likely means
degrading the video and audio quality (lossy re-encoding is unnecessary and
unwise to preserve audio & video quality).
- uploading to any third-party hoster means delays between uploading the
video and being able to test that the video works when seen in a webpage.
Locally-hosted materials don't have this delay; they're available as soon
as the file is uploaded.
- there's no need to fear not having available storage; storage is cheap
and if more storage is needed, I'd recommend archive.org become the hoster
not YouTube. archive.org will host and distribute verbatim copies of what
is uploaded (albeit with the aforementioned initial delay between uploading
and being available). archive.org's re-encodes are optionally usable.
archive.org makes the source upload available (and offers an XML file
indicating which file was the source file uploaded to them).
- the HTML video element is simple, makes it easy for users to download the
video to retain a copy, works well, scales up well to include alternate
sources, and doesn't require Javascript. YouTube doesn't work with this
standard markup (archive.org and local hosting do work with this standard
markup). The HTML video element also promotes local control over how one
sees the video -- the UI is implemented in the browser which means when
people run free software browsers they gain control over the video
element's user interface. YouTube's user interface is non-free software
controlled by YouTube which also purposefully makes it needlessly hard to
download a copy of the video and automatically fall back to another copy.
Why get away from the simpler, more scalable, free software-supporting HTML
markup approach?
- YouTube has shown they'll censor videos discussing things they don't
like. All third-party hosting carries this risk. It's not easy to predict
which videos will be censored or when. Why give into that power?
More information about the Freedombox-discuss
mailing list