D.Tube 0.6: Pushing it to the limit

in #dtube7 years ago (edited)

So many things done, so many things to talk about again in this blog article for DTube...

First, I haven't blogged about it but a lot of people noticed that the @dtube account now has 1M SP delegated from @ned. This is helping us tremendously to gather funds for the project development and infrastructure. As collateral damage, our uploads have more than quadrupled in the last month since 0.5, we are nearing 1 video per minute.

A lot of people keep messaging me asking me why @dtube upvotes or not, if it is a bot or not. It is not a bot, we actually try to watch as many videos as possible, and if we like it we upvote! It is very possible that some good videos get missed, it is getting difficult to look at everything right now.

More encoding power

I said in the previous article that I was expecting the uploading server to be enough power not to have any queues. Well I was wrong, it seems we have been hitting our maximum encoding capacity at peak times of the day. Why? Because our uploads grew from 200ish videos a day to 1000 videos a day during patch 0.5! I therefore invested some of our STEEM into renting 2 more servers for the encoding, which should triple up our power and hold for a while, maybe.

New Logo

Apparently a lot of people were unable to see the D in the previous DTube logo. A lot of people also started using user made logos. This was going nowhere good :) Here is the new iteration of our logo:

Media Kit

We now provide a media kit for anyone who wants to include a DTube logo in his work. This has been requested so many times on our discord server. If you want to make your own DTube tshirts, mugs, or whatever, you can find PNG and SVG version of our new logo.

We also updated about.d.tube to match our definitive colors and current logo.

Player

The player is where a big part of the magic happens. We decided to patch it early (few days ago), so this part is not really new for active DTube users but I'll still put the changes in here.

Loading Logic

In version 0.2 I changed the loading logic of the videos from using a random gateway, to using a canonical gateway for each file. While this worked really well to reduce the load on all gateways and avoid file being transfered for no reason, it also made a large portion of our videos stop loading when a single ipfs gateway had issues. In this version, the player will now make a HEAD request to every gateway, and find out on which gateway the file is the most available, to you. If a single gateway already has a file available, it will answer faster than others. If multiple gateways already have a file available, most probably the closest geographical one will be the fastest one to answer.

Full custom design

We were using some open source design for our player before, which was actually very close to the official player that the BBC used for a while. @hightouch managed to redesign the whole player into something that fits what we need, with a proper settings menu. At the moment we still only have the playback speed option, but more is coming.

Hotkeys

You should now be able to control the video player more efficiently if you are a keyboard warrior. Space to pause, left and right to go backward / forward, numbers to go to a certain part of a video.

Also mouse users will be happy to know they can now adjust the volume by scrolling the mouse wheel when the player is focused.

Video preview on mouse hover

This wasn't patched earlier because it was too good to reveal ;) and we already had it tested. You can now preview what a video looks like at a certain time without even downloading the video. Wow. Just hover your mouse on the time bar of the video, and the preview will automatically display. This should work for every video uploaded after we released 0.5 so about a month ago.

Optimizing Pictures

DTube's snaps were uploaded straight to IPFS before this patch, and some people were submitting some absurdly high resolution images, considering the fact that these pictures would never get seen at more than 210x118 pixels on DTube. We would also load an insane amount of pictures on some pages like the homepage (12 per line - 60 total for logged in users). We therefore went through with two simple enough changes to drastically improve bandwidth without impacting the on-screen quality.

Lazy Loading Images

What is lazy loading? It's the fact that an element will only load when needed, instead of stupidly on page load. We applied lazy loading to most pictures on DTube. Pictures that are lazy loaded will load with a short fade-in animation.

Manipulating your snaps

On top of that, we will also now resize every uploaded snap through our server to 210x118 pixels resolution (the resolution we use on DTube), minimizing file size. This should also fix snap upload issues.

Content Discovery

A big problem of DTube was how it was pretty hard to find more than the really popular content creators like @exyle, @dollarvigilante, @acidyo or @davidpakman to name a few. Those are lucky to be displayed on the homepage regularly, but it's not the case of the 'lower' 99% of our users. So here are a few things that should help our newer, motivated users to get detected by dolphins/whales.

Curiosity is a very human thing, and if DTube increases the ways in which users can discover content they like, they will naturally spend more time browsing DTube. According to similarweb.com, DTube's users stay for 5 minutes on average, against close to 20 minutes for YouTube. I predict that these changes will increase the time spent on DTube by users a lot.

Dedicated trending / hot / new pages with infinite scrolling

Remember the old trending page we had, which displayed up to 25 videos maximum and was basically useless? We enhanced it to make it load infinitely as many content as you want, by simply scrolling down like on steemit. Then we did the same for the hot and the new videos. This enables you to discover as many content as you want.

Tags browsing

Ah finally! I've been requesting users to enter tags during the upload since 0.1 but it's never been displayed anywhere until today (so for a total of five months).

At least the tag feature is coming in a full pack. Firstly, a short list of the top tags on dtube are now shown at the bottom of the sidebar. Tags are also now displayed under the title of your videos.

Lastly, clicking on these tags will now take you to the tag page where you can discover content from the same tag. On the tag page, you can also filter by upload date and video duration, and sort videos by payout, votes, or upload date.

This will help you easily discover other DTubers matching your interests and start networking with them by giving them votes and comments.

Improved related videos

Of course the related videos should be the main place where content discovery is made. It's the most natural way. We are now using the related feature of the AskSteem API to fetch related videos to the currently viewed one. It's certainly not as good as YouTube's algorithm but it should be a good start. As we get more videos day after day, I'm sure the quality of the related videos will improve by itself.

This should allow you to watch infinitely many videos by simply staying on the video page and watching video after video, instead of being forced of watching always the same content creator like before.

Watch Later

New feature! Ever received a link from someone for a long video but didn't have time to watch it? You can now use the 'Watch Later' option, accessible either through the top-right angle of the snap, or in the little (...) menu under the video.

You can then access these videos at anytime from the sidebar->watch later link. Be careful though if you change device, it won't see the video you added to the watch later on your other device. The data is inside your device, not your account.

Design Changes

Channel Page improved again

We added a default cover image so that it doesn't look ugly. Also added some numbers showing the estimated value of the account (with more detail on mouse hovering), voting power and reputation.

The loading still sucks, and won't show more than your last 100 STEEM contents, so this page still requires some work from us.

Slick Carousel to Owl Carousel

The carousel is the thing that that 'rotates' videos of each category in the homepage. We've been using a pretty slow module and replaced it with a lighter and faster one. Consequently the homepage will load a bit faster. It's still not fast enough by my taste so we might need to have our own carousel to get the homepage rendering faster.

Night Mode

SteemIt did it so why not DTube? Feel free to try out the dark version of DTube by going into the settings and enabling 'Night Mode'.

You can now Login using SteemConnect

A much requested feature! While I personally believe that using the posting key will always be safer, a lot of users are complaning that they cannot login (despite explaining how to retrieve a login key in the #1 question our help page).

SteemConnect is a nice alternative for logging in that is easy and secure. If you try to login on DTube now, there should be a blue SteemConnect button. For your first login on DTube, it will ask for your active key, in order to delegate the posting authority to SteemConnect.

After that, if logged in on SteemConnect, it will log you in automatically by only pressing one button. Your SteemConnect sessions can only stay for up to 7 days, after that you will need to login again.

Partnered with Discord: discord.gg/dtube

Getting messages from multiple sources of information doesn't help my daily tasks. I want the Discord server to become the main chat for the DTube community, I believe it works well and has a lot of advanced features that we require. The dtube SteemIt.chat channel will still exist, but we will not be checking it very often, so it is much better to join our discord if you need help or just want to start networking with other DTubers.

Last words

As you can see, we added a lot of pages and features in this version that should make DTube feel much more complete. A lot of promised features have now been delivered, and only a few are left from my original todo list. What's left in it? Basically notifications, subtitles, mobile apps and enabling search-engine crawling, so that google can finally see DTube's content. The search would need some improvement as well.

DTube has grown faster over the last month than it ever did, and seems to be entering snowball mode. More and more people are converting. Every new level of traffic we reach, creates new issues and challenges for our team. I don't know how long we can keep growing at this pace, but within the next month, we will probably start using GPUs (with the NVENC library) to encode videos. This should increase our efficiency a lot and help us scale into hundreds of thousands of videos per day if we ever reach that point.

With the recent rise of the price of STEEM, we should be making enough money from curation and beneficiary rewards to keep growing until we reach a technical limit or a popularity limit. Our team is still working well and next update should come within a month or so again.

As usual, feel free to comment underneath about the changes (especially the logo), let us know if you think something is wrong and you think we should revise it.


Join DTube's Discord server: https://discord.gg/dtube
Put some stars on our GitHub: https://github.com/dtube
Translate DTube to your language: https://crowdin.com/project/dtube
How to login on DTube: https://about.d.tube#faq1
DTube: https://d.tube
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Just finished my german translation: German Translation: DTube 0.6 - Wir gehen ans Limit- feel free to share it!

Regarding the growth of your platform and the content of the update I just can say:

Awesome! Keep going that way!

Greets!

p.S: Gonna self-upvote this for visibility!

Nice lens hope your vision is clear

Quiet interesting.

Whoa you're pushing this post to the limit

Way to go! You've made nearly $3k! I'm sure this is worth every penny of it.

Dear @theaustrianguy,

The logo of Dtube is more attractive. And its like youtube.:)

Wordness Supreme bro :0

Awesome, try it

Just thank you!

nice one

amazing photos
Thank you for visiting my blog -- @simisto. Please upvote and follow me.

Good day! Thanks for the useful information.

successful

Dtube 1.0 will be so epic i expect it to have all of the features of youtube

i want steemit to trust dtube and allow embedd videos!

Finally Dtube has Embedded Videos on buys.org!
https://alpha.steepshot.io/post/@ackza/20180302t062635100z-post
https://steemit.com/dtube/@ackza/20180302t062635100z-post

See finally we have Dtube embedded videos on Busy.org

Nice to have this platform. But do anyone know how to produce a video with easy software?

I mean i know its like, late, but i do, i use AVS Video Editor, its eaaasy, and really fast, for decent computer, i tried popular edditors, like sony vegas, adobe, and that one AVS is like MS paint, its light and simple, just like i needed. My advice is go to Yout... i mean some Dtube and see what program tutorials seems easy for You, and use that program.

WOW!!! I love this list of changes! Keep on doing the good work!

I'm quite new to steemit and d.tube was 1 of the big surprises. I use youtube since a couple years to upload travel and diving compilations but the re encoding is really frustrating. You work for hours to make a video compilation in adobe premiere to see it then being downscaled to 5 Mbps on youtube.
I kept searching in de d.tube faq for the maximum bitrate settings for my uploads and couldn't believe at first that you can upload and watch lossless. The video below is the best example. Worked about 30 hours on it and now I can finally show it to people lossless without needing wetransfer to send it.

Youtube:


D.tube:

Although sometimes I still run into some bugs, the d.tube platform feels very finished considering the 5 months it exist. I'm looking forward to see what 0.7 will bring.

Got bless you.

Do your videos post smoothly to DTube? Because mine won’t upload it keeps saying IPFS error

Yes, uploaded 6 video's now from different lengths with high bitrates so the files are large but never had an error or problem. Only ones I had a bug where for some reason the snap I uploaded wasn't used but the snap of a previous video I uploaded was attached. When I upload from work where we have an 100 Mb/sec upload line the video uploads really fast.

I upload from Belgium and I read a lot of servers are located in Western Europe. Maybe that makes a difference in stability and speed.

Those things are too complicated for me but I believe they should put videos of boobs on dtube...and porn.....I also want to use this space to advertise the butchery of my uncle that is called "Alcobia butchery"...They say the meat there is spoiled and is a crap but is just sometimes...sometimes you can eat it......Please upvote my work, not because it's good(because it's not) but because I need the money for wine, drugs and for Gina, that is a girl that works in a street close to mine and she charges 50 euros each time(There is Vanessa, who charges 25, but she has only 1 teeth and she has a moustache

I voted this comment because it's very very very very very very very very very very good....Some say it's the best comment ever made on the steem blockchain

It's very bad you can only comment once in 20 seconds because I have to be waiting 20 seconds to comment and Gina is waiting for me.

haha v.funny @duartenunes :P lolz

I get that you may be acting a bit comedic here, but have some decency and respect this lady please. At least make your own comment and not a sub-comment on hers so she is forced to read your crude remarks.

you better relax and go to your yogas and detoxes and etc......those detoxes are a good laxative....but beware because in your bathroom it will seem there was a bombardment of shit

I convinced this guy to join dtube.....apart from being my friend, and the best person I know in terms of character, he imitates different voices with no problem he is the first Dtube stand-up comedian.....in spite of having no followers, he got a decent reward just in the first stand-up comedian video.....then, strangely it's reducing while people that only talk about themselves, about how gay they are(nothing against), about how good they are, get crazy rewards...I hope you guys REALLY WATCH THE VIDEOS and don't curate just based on the image, on the viewers of the first day, etc because that can be easily made up......uncommonly on steem, when posts only have videos in the first 7 days, his older posts KEEP HAVING NEW VIEWERS and this is uncommon.....THIS MEANS THE VIEWERS OF 1 VIDEO LIKE IT AND WILL WATCH HIS OTHER VIDEOS.....HIS OLDER VIDEOS HAVE THE SAME VIEWERS AS THE OLDER VIDEOS OF GUYS WITH MUCH MORE FOLLOWERS AND MUCH HIGHER REWARDS.......his videos in the first day get lower views because he still has few followers......I had with him, when we were 18, an amateur comediant group called "Os Duartes"....we used to act in bars......once one of the biggest comediants in Portugal(probably the best) saw the show and INVITED HIM TO BE AN ACTOR ON HIS NATIONAL TV SHOW ON SUNDAYS....AND THIS GUY REFUSED BECAUSE HE WAS SHY AND DIDN'T WANT TO APPEAR ON NATIONAL TV(HOW HUMBLE THIS GUY IS????).....so I agree when he says he is an idiot......to dtube curators I say: Don't curate based on first image or views in the first day....Really WATCH HIS VIDEOS because he is REALLY VERY GOOD....watch the videos and tell me your opinion....other proof this guy is an idiot is because he wants to quit Dtube...don't allow him to do that. (fiz a minha parte)

nah...I have wronged you...this @fromportugal is a other account I have and I use it to compliment myself faking I am other person.......I am just a fool but I need the money for wine and prostitutes(that part is true)

Don't joke man...people think it's true what you say.....I'm disappointed.,....People: What I said is ALL TRUE!!!!!!! Some people dislike you because they hide the good rewards they have on dtube with posts with less rewards...and they don't like the fact you make a video telling it compensates to post on dtube...they don't like competition...it's not because their butthole is a party place that they are good people.

I think it's great

successful

IPFS is something you have to run through your command box, google 'IPFS getting started'

IPFS is very good, she works very well....but I prefer Gina...the problem is that she charges 50 euros each time and it's only 20 minutes

Man this guy is actually weird

not really...weird is when I take the meds.....usually I am very weird

Is d tube like YouTube, I stay hearing about it

Yes, but no, but yes, but no, but better - but still in beta ;) Just stay here, bring your friends, some popcorn & enjoy (better quality & content) !! 8)

I can't watch any of my Dtube videos :/ I can watch other people's though, idk what's going on

Dont watch mine...they are too bad...but upvote it because I need money for prostitutes

Thx 4 the advice! Haven't watched them.. better not ^^ but upvote for your comment. Don't worry, in the future you pay them with Steem ;) .. or you pay them for foodporn :D

same here, it took 5hrs for me to upload a video just 20%, and on youtube it uploaded in just 2 hours. please help techies..

How long is the video you wanted to upload?

I like you....you look better than Gina

17 MINUTES.

Have you heard of HandBrake? (software)

You should download and learn to use it. It will help you to significantly reduce the file sizes and thus making the upload times much slower. Hope this helps

Yupp, I get the IPFS error for months now, a little heartbreaking..

I would really love for steemit and dtube to get together, make love and then ALLOW EMBEDDING PLEASE!!

YES IT IS A GOOD WAY TO POST VIDEOS FAST

I think it's great

Didnt thought that D-Tube is so amazing! Gonna start our own channel ! So excited! I mean youtube has become too competetive. The D Tube Community is much more relaxed and you dont get invisible in the big crowd i think.

I'm going to check it out now

You do realize the same thing will happen once more people join DTube, don't you?

exactly my thoughts lol

Hello cryptowani. I Followed you.If you follow me, I'll be happy.Thanks :)

I am planning to start a porn channel...I used to do stand-up but curation is being reduced for me...

So if I switch to "Source" on D-tube, is it 1080p @60 ?
If so, that would be great.

Yes, when I compare with the local file I can't see any difference. Haven't tried with 4K video yet but it should be the same as the source.

Of course it isn't by accident that youtube re encodes video to a lower bitrate. I'm curious if they can keep it up when more en more video's get uploaded en played. Has the IPFS network enough capacity?

Technically Source is whatever the person uploads. So if the person uploaded a 720p 30fps file, then that's what the source is on that video. On the other hand, somebody could upload an 8K 120FPS file.

With youtube monetization down censorship at an all-time high on the site. I honestly feel like DTube, with the right marketing could be the next big video platform. The payment method is amazing. post good content and people can show you that they like it right then and there. Im looking forward to the future. of Steemit and Dtube, and glad to be a part of the community.

This could be a big thing. At the moment it feels very "beta" probably because it is just that

That is great work perfect view @pieter87

nice team yes

come on my blog,thanks

yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah!

The lady seems worst than Gina but is better than Vanessa

Thanks for your post!
Please Follow, Upvote & Resteem my post to help us to travel & explore more
https://steemit.com/travel/@jonbee/travel-with-us-ep-01-kushtia-sugar-mills-kushtia-bangladesh-bd-steemian

Hi , Friend Your Post is so sweet.

Yo hablo español y me gusta Paella y la cerveza San Miguel....pero me gusta mas las drogas

I read your article very well. Thank you. Have a nice day.

I think it's great

Dtube Amazing Amazing Amazing. I Want to Try to use apload Dtube vidio fore.

Thanks a lot for the great work you're doing and all your support bro! This has helped me a lot with my charity work and upcoming projects, we are all but grateful, keep up the good work!

This is what I call a big update.

Thank you for all the improvements, for being fair and for the fat upvotes @heimindanger!

I really like the logo. I will surely print it on my T shirts and promote Dtube here in the Philippines! Thanks @heiminganger and all the Dtube devs team...

This is one of the biggest update man.....

not only biggest update this is also valuable post.

yes d tube is amazing

yes d tube is extra ordinary

nice post I am currently login DTube and follow you

so cool nice view

Yeah, excellent update! Greatings from Venezuela @jonsnow1983 and good luck with your charity projects! :D... (Do you have any piece of advice for people who want to help more people?... Thanks!)

Great platform. Just spent some time on it. Easy to use and pretty self explanatory. I don't mind the similarities to other platforms either. There are so many that it's impossible to avoid. Thanks for the post too. I'm not concerned with receiving your up vote, just genuinely enjoy new roads and yours is one I'm gonna travel on!

Great to see DTube really stepping up it's game! Let's take down the evil Google/Alphabet/YouTube empire!

I found myself just smiling whilst reading this. It seems DTube alone is getting ahead of quite a few cryptocurrency projects I could mention.

My only thought when reading about the nice additions you're making to content discovery is not to get too tied up in the structures made on steemit with the Hot and Trending page. My experience generally with using new steem apps is that I want an app that helps me find what I want, not one that just displays what steem stakeholders want to reward.

Loved the new logo.