Discourse forums that are Reddit-style (and short-clip heavy)

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Few video-related questions:

  1. Are there Discourse forums that are Reddit-style where posts are mostly about video sharing?
  2. What’s the best video hosting service to use that will be easy for the users while still giving us control over data (so we can manage the archives better)?
  3. We have a native iOS and Android app where the videos are viewable for playback (and stored in AWS). This is where the videos are generated and what we want users to share so the best case scenario is to allow users to download it on their phone and have a direct post to our forum. What’s the best way to do this?

Context:
We want to create a category of “Share your funny videos” and ask our users to submit and vote but since Discourse is not a video-hosting solution, some users will upload to YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox, Facebook, etc. and put links. This will cause issues and poor user experience because the videos are everywhere and the posts will not be consistent - some preview, some aren’t onebox, etc. We also don’t expect users to understand using HTML tags. Any tips?

New to Discourse. Thanks a lot!

Edit: The subject now says short-clip to represent the discussion better

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Most people tend to use YouTube with a little bit of Vimeo so this is rarely a problem in practice.

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Jeff,

Thanks. For more context, our product is a smart home cam and it’s meant to capture random 12 sec events in the mobile phone, and the goal is to encourage content generation to spur discussions.

The users are not content creators, several may be non-tech savvy and patient enough to download the video recording on the phone, go to YouTube to upload the content, then copy paste the link to the forum.

Have you seen solutions that can reduce steps and minimize friction?

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How large are these 12 second videos on average? What resolution and frame rate are they captured at?

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Around 3mb, 1080p, 15fps.

Example: Wyze Cam - Dog Traps Himself in the Corner | Facebook

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Right then 3mb is well within the 10mb default upload limit for Discourse and certainly not significantly bigger than fancy digital camera photos so you should be fine.

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That’s good news, there’s also the second use case where customers can do continuous recording and time lapse and this can go for 2-3 mins and this goes beyond 10mb. I didn’t mention this earlier because I wanted to at least clear the bar for the 12-sec clips.

For these cases, can we set setup mod approval/exceptions or allow admin to post? What’s the recommended approach?
Example: Wyze Cam - BEAR BREAKS INTO HOUSE!! CAUGHT ON WYZE CAM | Facebook

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Why would it be disallowed? It’s well under the 10mb default limit. There’s nothing special you need to do.

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FB compresses the video so I meant to give this example to show duration (not the file size). There are 20 sec clips that are 30mb, and 1-2min clips that are larger.

As you and others have mentioned in other posts, Discourse is not meant to be a video hosting site. Hence, my question on what can be done aside from asking users to use YouTube and Vimeo, which lean towards edited/curated content for creators.

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If they are very small videos that are borderline animated gifs then that should be fine.

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Thanks a lot, will verify the file sizes with the team (but users don’t make 5+ mins vids).

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I would be interested in improving this use case in Discourse for very short videos as we all want bandwidth heavy gifs to go the way of the dodo :sweat_smile:

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Let me know how we can help shape this. We have a lot of use cases for <5 min clips and turns out that this group is underserved - not as easy as copy paste, not too fancy that it’s worth the hassle of posting on YouTube or Vimeo, and perhaps not always Instagram worthy. So it’s a tricky use case. I still love GIFs tho :slight_smile:

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