[Freedombox-discuss] youtube and twitter freedombox appearance

[J.B. Nicholson]

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?