Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Community/Chemistry-friendly Video Hosting Site

DavidJR - 30-4-2018 at 07:12

Since it's become clear recently that youtube (et al) is hostile towards chemistry videos etc, I think it's time we had our own community video site.

I've spent the last few days examining the options re open source video sharing software and have selected what I think is the best option and set up a site.

So, I present ScienceMadness Video: https://smvideo.djr.pw

I'm currently in the process of importing my archive of chemplayer videos, so those should slowly appear on the site as transcoding completes. For the next few days, any videos uploaded by you guys may take a long time to be published due to the large amount of work in the transcoding queue caused by the bulk import. @Chemplayer: U2U me and I'll give you the password to the account I've uploaded your videos to.

I hope the SM team are okay with me using the logo/name and of course I'll give the admins/mods here the relevant permissions -U2U me. If it's agreeable then it'd be nice to have it on a subdomain of sciencemadness.org too.

If this takes off then I may have to seek donations towards hosting costs.

Please let me know what you think.

Rhodanide - 30-4-2018 at 07:19

Quote: Originally posted by DavidJR  
Since it's become clear recently that youtube (et al) is hostile towards chemistry videos etc, I think it's time we had our own community video site.

I've spent the last few days examining the options re open source video sharing software and have selected what I think is the best option and set up a site.

So, I present ScienceMadness Video: https://smvideo.djr.pw

I'm currently in the process of importing my archive of chemplayer videos, so those should slowly appear on the site as transcoding completes. For the next few days, any videos uploaded by you guys may take a long time to be published due to the large amount of work in the transcoding queue caused by the bulk import. @Chemplayer: U2U me and I'll give you the password to the account I've uploaded your videos to.

I hope the SM team are okay with me using the logo/name and of course I'll give the admins/mods here the relevant permissions -U2U me. If it's agreeable then it'd be nice to have it on a subdomain of sciencemadness.org too.

If this takes off then I may have to seek donations towards hosting costs.

Please let me know what you think.



Awesome work, just signed up.
EDIT: Okay bud you reeeeeaaalllly need to up the file size limit.

[Edited on 4-30-2018 by Rhodanide]

DavidJR - 30-4-2018 at 07:34

Quote: Originally posted by Rhodanide  

Okay bud you reeeeeaaalllly need to up the file size limit.


What do you think is a reasonable value?

Texium - 30-4-2018 at 07:55

This is a very nice idea! You should U2U Polverone, if you haven't already, about getting it transferred to the sciencemadness.org domain. I just made an account on there, and I figure I might as well upload my videos for posterity in case YouTube ever takes them down.

DavidJR - 30-4-2018 at 09:05

I forgot that I had set this up on a testing VM with limited storage. So, later today I will move it over to a server which has more plentiful storage (2TB). I should have done this before posting about it on here, but oh well.

Rhodanide - 30-4-2018 at 10:05

Quote: Originally posted by DavidJR  
Quote: Originally posted by Rhodanide  

Okay bud you reeeeeaaalllly need to up the file size limit.


What do you think is a reasonable value?


900 MB or so, 500 MB isn't enough for videos longer than 10 minutes in my experience.

DavidJR - 30-4-2018 at 10:23

Quote: Originally posted by Rhodanide  

900 MB or so, 500 MB isn't enough for videos longer than 10 minutes in my experience.


Depends on the encoding. But, since the software is set to downscale to 720p and reencode to make it smaller anyway, I'll up the upload limit to 1GB once I've got it transferred to the server with more disk space.

The Volatile Chemist - 30-4-2018 at 10:35

I'm not getting a registration confirmation email, perhaps I just signed up incorrectly. But great work! This really looks awesome, looking forward to using it.

DavidJR - 30-4-2018 at 10:58

Quote: Originally posted by The Volatile Chemist  
I'm not getting a registration confirmation email, perhaps I just signed up incorrectly. But great work! This really looks awesome, looking forward to using it.


Hmm, I'll need to look into that. In the mean time I have manually activated your account.

Texium - 30-4-2018 at 11:05

Quote: Originally posted by The Volatile Chemist  
I'm not getting a registration confirmation email, perhaps I just signed up incorrectly. But great work! This really looks awesome, looking forward to using it.
Check your spam. I didn't see mine at first either, but gmail automatically Detritused it, haha.

DavidJR - 30-4-2018 at 11:41

Ok, going down just now to transfer to proper server.

Edit: Done.

[Edited on 30-4-2018 by DavidJR]

The Volatile Chemist - 30-4-2018 at 12:41

Thanks Texium, that was it. And thanks DavidJR, great work so far!

DavidJR - 30-4-2018 at 12:50

Email deliverability should be fixed now, I have set it to send from smvideo@davidr.me at the moment because I have an SMTP server set up with proper DKIM/SPF etc for that domain.

Edit: also, upload filesize limit increased to 1GB for now.

[Edited on 30-4-2018 by DavidJR]

Velzee - 30-4-2018 at 13:30

This is amazing! Thank you DavidJR!

chemplayer... - 2-5-2018 at 04:56

Amazing work! Just signed up and the registration worked fine.

DavidJR - 2-5-2018 at 07:53

Quote: Originally posted by chemplayer...  
Amazing work! Just signed up and the registration worked fine.


I've U2U'd you the password for the account I used to import my archive of your videos.

chemplayer... - 3-5-2018 at 18:18

Thanks! Looks like the encoding is still processing but I'll try to do a reconciliation against the master-archive once they are all complete and see if there are any missing which I can upload. Some of the newer ones (in 1080p 60fps) were very large files (over 1Gb each) but I can regenerate down to 720p for the time being if needed.

j_sum1 - 4-5-2018 at 02:45

This is nothing short of awesome, Thanks DavidJR.

Question. Suppose I wanted to upload some videos to preserve a yt channel. Is there a way of adding them to the pool but not putting them under my own name -- I would rather not have it look like I was taking credit for someone else's work.

My thoughts are towards preserving some great YT channels and prioritising the ones where the owner has been inactive on both YT and SM for some time. Those are the ones that will likely be completely lost if yt got nasty about them.

Tdep - 4-5-2018 at 03:37

If they're inactive but their videos are still up on YouTube, I don't think it's right to re-upload them to a different site. Chemplayer is particularly easy going with that aspect but others certainly are not. If you think they're going to be deleted, save them for sure, but only when they go down do you reupload them elsewhere in my opinion. If they're still up, then the viewers should really go there to watch the video

j_sum1 - 4-5-2018 at 03:39

Yeah, good point.

I was thinking of myst32YT and hkparker in particular.

PirateDocBrown - 4-5-2018 at 06:24

Just DL and archive them for now. As long as YT is still hosting them nothing more needs to be done.

If and when YT decides to pull the plug on them, a decision can then be made to make them available, like Tdep says. Certainly the authors should be reached out to.

Does anyone have access to Explosions and Fire's original stuff? Can he be reached out to?

Texium - 4-5-2018 at 06:46

Ha, Tdep is Explosions&Fire. And his videos are currently all up on Explosions&Fire2, which has not been taken down (yet).

PirateDocBrown - 4-5-2018 at 11:55

Woot! That's good news!

CaptainMolo - 4-5-2018 at 12:33

If you ever need help with the server, or other software/IT related stuff, that's my day job. I'd be more than happy to help. I have over a decade of experience with Linux and Windows servers. Also many years doing programming work in general, from websites to apps.

[Edited on 4-5-2018 by CaptainMolo]

JJay - 11-10-2018 at 14:38

smvideo.djr.pw has been down for the past week or so. Does anyone know if it is coming back up?

Chemguy5 - 15-10-2018 at 18:07

Awesome idea

DavidJR - 16-10-2018 at 03:43

Quote: Originally posted by JJay  
smvideo.djr.pw has been down for the past week or so. Does anyone know if it is coming back up?


Sorry - the situation is that the hosting provider, despite having my card details, failed to automatically renew the service as I had instructed. This resulted in them deleting the contents of my server. They sent an auto-email to say they had done that, but no prior warning email - I presume because their system is set up to not send payment reminder emails to customers who have requested automatic renewal. I will certainly not be using them again...

I haven't had time to do anything about this situation, so that's why the site is still down.

Anyway - I am thinking it may be better to recommend a decentralised solution, like Bitchute (as used by Chemplayer). This would avoid many of the problems of having videos hosted in one central location/by one service.

streety - 16-10-2018 at 13:17

Would you be willing to name and shame? Sounds like a provider to avoid.

I'm not sure I would describe bitchute as a decentralized solution. There is still a single point of failure. They try to distribute the bandwidth/cost of serving videos but they only seems to work on the most popular videos. Quite often videos don't start at all.

I think the move to different platforms is healthy in the long term but there is value in having a single directory to refer to.

DavidJR - 16-10-2018 at 14:03

Quote: Originally posted by streety  
Would you be willing to name and shame? Sounds like a provider to avoid.

I would prefer not to name/shame at this stage .
Quote: Originally posted by streety  

They try to distribute the bandwidth/cost of serving videos but they only seems to work on the most popular videos. Quite often videos don't start at all.


I have definitely experienced videos not starting to play as well. This appears to be when there are no peers at all to download the video from.
Quote: Originally posted by streety  

I'm not sure I would describe bitchute as a decentralized solution. There is still a single point of failure. [...]

I think the move to different platforms is healthy in the long term but there is value in having a single directory to refer to.


It's not totally decentralised but I think it's a step in the right direction. Perhaps what is really needed is some sort of federated/semi-decentralized system - I'm thinking something similar to the diaspora* project. This is unfortunately not a trivial problem to solve.

A stopgap approach could be to instead have a script run on a server and automatically download and re-seed videos from a specified list of bitchute channels, which would improve the availability issue. Could also have a web interface listing the chemistry channels/videos on the list and having a way to request a chemistry channel be added to the list of channels to seed.