Discourse Livestream

Plugin
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23

Hi Nat,
When I used this plugin at a former community, we could hide the video-player iframe until the user hit Going.

24

This is an excellent feature request, and seems as though it would be quite doable. I can see our sites using it quite a lot as we have the same problem with cluttered meeting / event Topics. @nat - could that be broken out into its own Feature topic?

1 Like
25

It does sound like the request is being made in this plugin topic but out of convenience.

From what I can read here it feels like folks want “short lived” information within a topic itself, and since Livestream has this ability, folks are leveraging this to do more things.

My suggestion would be for you to create the Feature topic with very specific requests. Or better yet upvote an existing one.

3 Likes
26

Maybe this Topic is the best place - we are actually debating the core use-case of the Plugin.

It would make sense to me if it was instead the Discourse Topic Chats Plugin, with Livestreaming being one of the use-cases (simple events another - I’m sure that there would be more).

This could be achieved by having a setting for the Tags (and/or Categories) that this should apply to, instead of locking it to the livestream tag.

2 Likes
27

To circle back on the solution for anyone else, you block out the content with the following:

[preview]
Here is preview text that is be visible prior to RSVP'ing
[/preview]

[hidden]
This section is not visible until the user RSVP's going
[/hidden]

I mistakenly thought it meant:

[wrap="preview"]
[/wrap]

[wrap="hidden"]
[/wrap]
8 Likes
28

I used this on my forum to do a watch party for Sony’s State of Play. We really liked it, but I am a bit confused about what this plugin does exactly.

It seems me that the purpose of this plugin is to watch videos synchronously with others. It happens to be the case that we were watching a Youtube livestream, so our video feeds were synced… until the livestream was over. Changing the video time afterwards, the playback didn’t get synced to others. But, the original post has a screenshot of the rick roll Youtube video, so maybe it does sync the playback and I’m just not aware of how that works? It would be nice if it did so we could do things like movie nights.

To be clear, I think not having playback sync is understandable since it’s quite a complicated feature as I understand it, but then am I correct in my understanding that all this plugin does is add a chat to the side of a thread? In that case, I don’t know why this plugin would have seemingly arbitrary requirements to have a video link embed, an event, and the livestream tag in order to add a chat sidebar to the right, or why the plugin has to be about livestreams specifically. In that case, I feel like @thoka’s suggestion is what this plugin does already, if this plugin just added one way to toggle the chat sidebar for topics instead of the other requirements.

1 Like
29

We ran into a bug where if you try to navigate to another livestream topic, the chat sidebar is not updated to the chat for that topic. This happens when, for example, a link is posted in a livestream chat to another livestream topic and you click that link.

1 Like
34

I just tested with Peertube live. It works, but I found the video delay between my laptop connected over WiFi to the Peertube (using OBS), and back is about 20 seconds, which seems a bit high for the usage I have in mind (replacing Twitch).

I guess using Peertube live and its chat directly would give less delay (and allow for federated participation in the chat).

Yet, I find it interesting and will pursue testing, especially as I would like to benefit from Discourse integration at some point, i.e., going live, and writing together in a post with shared editing enabled.

For now Peertube Live + HedgeDoc sounds easier than Discourse Livestream, but pad is not chat, and Peertube doesn’t have the event-attendance-to-chat feature, which could be combined with the Subscriptions plugin. Did anyone test that already?

A couple of things that could make things better:

  • hide or collapse video if you’re the streamer (although the delay makes it difficult to do anything synchronously now, in my case), i.e., if you’re the first poster, at least during the time of the event, to save screen estate;
  • go fullscreen and share the screen estate between video and chat, or keep the chat above the video, or maybe detach the chat and the video (picture-in-picture mode) so one can read the chat, watch the video, and do something else (like writing or browsing other topics and web pages);
  • and one last for the road: support ActivityPub in the chat, or maybe Chat Integrations even :slight_smile:

These popped up from the top of my mind, maybe it’s not useful or maybe there are easier or different solutions to these situations.

In any case it’s very encouraging to be able to livestream on Discourse.

4 Likes
35

Oh, and I forgot to mention a bug^W^W an undocumented feature: if enable_public_channels is unchecked, an Error 500 will fire. Although it would be easier to document it, I’d rather have the possibility to reserve the chat to select groups (as in the Livestream situation) than enabling chat for all categories: is there a way to do that using the existing settings?

36

Our event object remembers if the user is Going, but it doesn’t always load the pre-determined content for attendees. For context, we hide the player behind their Going status, but the platform frequently requires them to un-RSVP and re-RSVP for the content to be revealed. It seems like if they RSVP’d recently, it remembers (same day?), but I always add “if you don’t see the player, un-rsvp” in the preview body just in case.

Is there anything we can do to force the system to check their status as the page loads?

1 Like