As an alternative to Youtube, can this forum support embedding Odysee videos?
If you try right now, you get an HTML preview box, but you have to click it to go to an external site to see the video. I wish it would show the video embedded just like youtube videos.
For example:
Apparently it just needs a small setting change by an administrator, by adding odysee.com to the allowed iframes setting. Reference this discussion
Thanks for providing a video that explains your module and demonstrates how to use it. I wish every VCV Rack module developer would do that. I intend to do the same with every module I release. Written documentation is important, but a video is a very useful complement that often answers questions implicitly the author didn’t even consider to write about. You know, the things that are too obvious for the expert to mention, but the newbie doesn’t even know how to put into words to type into a search engine.
I had not heard of Odysee before. I read on their site that they are doing something with blockchain. Although I have a pretty good understanding of what a blockchain is and how it works, it isn’t clear what the use case is for hosting videos. Perhaps it makes content harder to censor? I will search for more info on Odysee + blockchain, but it would be great to hear any perspectives from people here.
What made you choose to use Odysee over YouTube for your video? I’m just curious and wanting to learn more.
Thanks for checking out the video, I made it for the same reasons that you mentioned. With written documentation you really have to put yourself into the developers mind, but with a video it often more easily brings the context into immediate focus.
The primary motivation for me to suggest Odysee is specifically because I choose not to have a Youtube account, I do not want to support their platform, and I actively avoid Youtube. Obviously, without a Youtube account, I can’t publish Youtube videos.
From a practical and technical perspective, youtube works fine. Its ubiquitous, fast, and in most circumstances, free-to-use. I mostly did not want to mention any political motivations, but they are very much on my mind: Youtube is not a neutral platform. Youtube probably doesn’t care about taking down anybody’s VCV Rack videos, but they regularly do this for videos of other controversial topics. They have outright banned youtubers from their platform, telling them to never return. I’m afraid Youtube has turned into a gatekeeper of the mind, and what they omit on their platform serves to manipulate their viewers. I think that promoting alternatives to youtube is a good way to maintain a free internet. I have similar feelings about Facebook, and for this reason I am thankful for having an alternative topic-focused forum like this one.
In functionality, Odysee is very similar to Youtube, and is easy to use without knowing anything about blockchain. However, on the backend Odysee uses the free and peer-to-peer LBRY network. This means that my uploaded videos are not stored primarily by Odysee, but are available freely on a global storage network with a public and standardized API. The blockchain creates a market for hosting storage nodes (anyone with a server can join this network, increasing its resiliency). Because of this, my video appears lots of other places besides Odysee.com, and I have a lot of options for how to access the content (to name only a few): there is a desktop LBRY client, and there is a self-hosted website anyone can install called Librarian. Odysee.com is just one option for viewing LBRY videos, but is probably the fastest and best option for embedding videos on a forum like this. There is also a browser extension called libredirect that can automatically redirect links from Odysee.com to another instance of Librarian (for example I self host my own Librarian on my own server and watch all videos that way). Libredirect also works with Youtube video links, including embeds. Tangentially, when I watch other peoples Youtube videos here on this forum, I do not see a Youtube.com embed, instead it transforms all the Youtube embeds into an embed from my own Invidious instance which I self-host (similar to Librarian, but Invidious is only for Youtube videos).
I am also interested in hearing about other alternatives to Youtube.
no gatekeeper. Do they have lots of info wars, and other right wing propaganda?
I don’t know. I’d like to keep you off of their site and have you stay here in this forum and watch an embedded video 100% about VCV Rack only.
oh, yes, that does sound like a nice idea - not forcing other videos on you.