First Class Support for 3rd Party Video Services

#1

I think that one of the primary reasons that Discourse and Discourse communities exist is to be a distributed system of ideas and discussion, free from any one perspective.

Linking to videos is a very popular way to share ideas in these discussions, but we’re pretty much limited to YouTube and maybe Vimeo for good built in video sharing.

SUMMARY:

  • MP4 video can be directly embedded into Discourse and they will play, but video hosting can get expensive
  • 3rd party sites like Mega or BitChute need to provide proper og:type="video" tags… Otherwise they rely on iframes and must be manually whitelisted.
  • PeerTube already supports og:type="video" and can be cleanly embedded into Discourse right now.

For example, PeerTube URLs can be pasted directly and will playback just fine:

https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/5a6133b8-3e0c-40dc-b859-69d0540c3fe5

2 Likes
#2

I disagree with your premises, but for the purpose of avoiding silo blocks, I’ve been using PeerTube video links with success. Vimeo has some “private” thing that prevents embedding in external sites, that prompted me to find another source for the video. Peertube works just fine out of silos.

Here, below, I write the link on a line on its own:


https://framatube.org/videos/watch/9c9de5e8-0a1e-484a-b099-e80766180a6d

And here’s the result:

Hmmm, a nice black block… On my instance, I whitelisted the instances I want to use.

2 Likes
#3

That’s exactly my point.

Many of these can be worked around manually with iframes, but that’s configuration changes in every single discourse instance installed.

This is completely different from the way that YouTube links are supported, just reinforcing a monopoly position.

1 Like
#4

Unless lots of people want this feature your best bet will be a plugin

#5

Due to the way PeerTube works, you only need to whitelist a single domain on your forum, and can have that instance pull the videos you want to include.

4 Likes
#6

This isn’t really the case, so the premise here is all wrong. You can link to direct mp4 videos from anywhere on the web and they will show as, y’know… videos.

3 Likes
#7

Yes, assuming that wherever the forum is hosted can afford to absorb the bandwidth for video hosting. For anything commercial, of course we can.

So the issues really is for non commercial use cases where video hosting is preferable a much larger bandwidth bill.

1 Like
#8

“I want this video to remain online regardless of who might dislike it” and “I don’t want to pay for it” are incompatible perspectives.

YouTube are well within their rights to take anything down from their service, because first and foremost it’s an advertising platform, free video hosting is a consequence of their ability to generate ad revenue. All free video platforms will run into this issue.

Bitchute technically doesn’t host the content and aren’t a video platform in the typical sense, they use a proprietary player to access a webtorrent asset, so conventional HTML5 video players aren’t an option. I’m not sure how much effort is worth investing in this particular case as the content which finds a home on bitchute up until now has typically been far-right, or come complete with a free tinfoil hat.

6 Likes
#9

That is a very good point.

Also, any site can embed videos in Discourse if they have correct og tags, like the framatube link above which works just fine because it contains a proper og:type="video" tag.

8 Likes
#10

I’m sorry, why I can’t embed my FreeTube videos? I include the link, as one from YouTube, and, instead show the usual player, it passes me a Wikipedia type Openbox…

What I have to do to embed the video by link, please? I’ve searched all “proper og:type="video" tag” links at the source code page and nothing. I have passed all morning trying to make it work… :sweat:

A test…

See? I don’t locate what difference is between your links and the mine ones. For me, they’re all the same, have the same structure: domain/videos/watch/numberofthevideo. But doesn’t develop the same.

I’ve tried to iframe it. Same result.

#11

I found the solution to my problem, so I will offer it for other people who, like me, is in need of clearer words and simple answers: PeerTube have multiple and different instances. Some of them support OneBox and others don’t. It’s so simple… If yours doesn’t do it, change, open another PeerTube account at another instance.

Thank you? :wink: Greetings.

3 Likes
#12

so by using PeerTube and white listing, we can prevent anyone not in the forum from seeing them or downloading them?