DTube 0.3: This update contains so many new features I could not find a good title for it

in #dtube7 years ago (edited)

Things are starting to settle down here for the DTube project. Many of the networking issues seem to be resolved with the automatic gateway system and viewing videos seems to be comfortable as long as the video bitrate is lower than the connection max speed. Issues are clear now, some are easy to fix, some are harder, but overall the minimum viable product seems to be viable. I believe it's now about time to introduce some features that will improve the user-experience this time around in 0.3.



DTube is now multi-language

Click here to see what DTube looks like in Korean!

I've been regularly browsing DTube, and it's clear that the huge majority of the content is in English. While the USA discovered the Internet before any other nation and got a culture boost out of that, that doesn't fully explain the super low number of videos in other languages. SteemIt has a lot of Korean or German content and I don't want to leave some countries/languages out of the loop for the development version of DTube.

DTube will detect your favorite language from your browser settings, and if the translation exists, it will download it and update all the texts in the UI. In order not to increase the app size, these translations are currently stored inside the STEEM blockchain (example). STEEM is amazing for translations, as SteemIt/ChainBB can be used as a UI to correct mistakes or add new translations.

Maybe hosting these translations on IPFS would be faster to load in most cases, but in the design of DTube I would rather use the blockchain for text, and only IPFS for 'bigger files'.

At the moment that I am launching 0.3, only seven languages are available:

Translate DTube for your language

Of course, seven languages are not enough. YouTube has too many to count. I also want all of the commonly spoken languages on Earth to be available on DTube. Doing this for most projects would be impossible, or take a lot of efforts to find competent translators. Luckily, STEEM is a social network that incentivizes cooperation instead of competition, and DTube has the support of the STEEM community. That's why I am adding a call for translators in this article. If you are not interested in helping, or you don't speak any non-translated language, feel free to skip this part of the article and go straight to the next new feature.

Before reading further, please understand that DTube is a work in progress and will be for a while. This means that there will be updates and probably some new lines added to the translation file regularly. You will be invited in the DTube private discord and we will notify you a few days before any new version so you have time to update your translation. This should happen about once every two weeks for at least a couple of months.

The English translation file for DTube 0.3 is available here. This will be your starting point to translate to your language. At the moment it's pretty short (87 lines in total), and should probably take less than an hour to translate. Save it to your disk and start editing the values (on the right), and leave the keys (capitalized stuff on the left) untouched. Some values contain some '%1', '%2', etc that represent some variables that will be replaced by the app. For example:

"GLOBAL_ERROR_VOTE_FOR":"%1 vote for %2"

This is the line for the text displayed when you upvote. In English it would display '100% upvote for dollarvigilante'. Some languages will require you to move these variables in other parts of the sentences sometimes. For example in French it becomes:

"GLOBAL_ERROR_VOTE_FOR":"Voté à %1 pour %2"

Once you have fully translated into a new language, feel free to contact me either through comments on this article, or on steemit.chat if my comments are spammed like past two articles and you want a quick reply.

Subscribe / Unsubscribe Button

The single most requested feature since launch was this one. The way you were able to browse DTube was very limited before this feature. All you could do was check new/hot/trending videos on the homepage. Even if you liked someone content, you wouldn't be able to see it through DTube if it didn't go to hot or trending unless you bookmarked the channel page and check it often.

As usual, I copied the way YouTube displays it in the UI. The button comes in with a counter showing the total follow count. YouTube shortens the count for big numbers such as '2M' or '42K' but I didn't feel like doing that as the maximum number of followers is still in the 5 digits range for STEEM.

I originally thought I would not to re-use the SteemIt follower counts, and make everyone restart at a 0 follower count on DTube. Unfortunatly that is not possible with the current state of the STEEM follow API, despite what the design of it suggests. So instead, your DTube list of followers is the same one for both SteemIt and DTube... I looked for a while at the code of the follow API, and I believe the required changes to make this possible are small. It's not because I follow someone on instagram that I want to subscribe to their YouTube automatically, I want to have the choice.

Feed

The subscribe button would be useless without this, so it comes in the same patch. This is more similar to SteemIt than YouTube in the way it's displayed on the screen.

It should take a bit longer to load than other categories because of STEEM limitations. The get_discussions_by_feed method of the STEEM blockchain does not behave like other get_discussions_by_* methods. I believe that if we could also filter the feed by tags, it would benefit applications which have a different type of content than steemit a lot.

The Trending/Hot/New categories on the homepage filter by tags. This is reliable because the number of people using the 'dtube' tag through steemit directly is negligible compared to the many DTubers who automatically have the 'dtube' tag.

The feed doesn't have this luxury option sadly, so instead it fetches the maximum amount (100) and filters out all of the non-videos. So if your feed only displays a few videos, this is likely the reason.

I really dislike the way the follow / feed works right now on STEEM. It requires me to make more calls through SteemJS and waste a lot of data. Little features like that is what apps that have different content types (think steepshot, dtube, dsound) need.

Follow us on @dtube

I sneaked in a 'dark' feature in DTube, but at least I decided to make it clear in this article. I'm trying it out mostly as an experiment. I predict that I will either look like an asshole for attempting it, or other applications will start doing the same thing soon. It all depends on your reactions in the comments.

Basically, whenever you log in on DTube, the app will automatically make you follow the @dtube account. There are no warnings or confirmations requested, and it won't even tell users what just happened in the background.

This will help me analyze a bit better the userbase of DTube. Because of the decentralized nature of DTube, we cannot use Google Analytics or automatic bug-reporting tools as we have no idea what it's really doing and might be leaking your keys somehow. So at least this way, I will have some data. I will be able to know how many people use DTube, and when these users first started using DTube.

Of course, I won't be shit-posting or resteeming my friends with the account. Anything posted/resteemed by this account will always be content that I believe can help DTube users, and most likely will be in video format.

Using Busy.org for images

Many people have noticed it, but avatar pictures were not displayed correctly on DTube in some cases. They would show as a missing picture or not display as a square as they should. This should now work properly, as we are using img.busy.org as the provider for all these pictures. Busy will automatically compress, crop and resize pictures, so that I don't need to worry about it! Same thing will probably be used for the cover pictures once we start working on the channel page.

Claim your rewards

Not a huge feature, but you can now claim your rewards directly on DTube. Inside the user menu, you will see a 'Claim Rewards' item that will tell you how much you will claim if you hover the button. While not a super-priority feature, this was quite easy and possible as it only requires the posting key. And it's clearly the most 'feel-good' transaction we can make on the STEEM blockchain.

I will use this paragraph to make a short aparté. I have no idea why these rewards can't be added on our wallet balances automatically like they were in the past. I can see how claiming rewards might be a good thing to avoid dead accounts making money, but there is already a 7 days maximum payment window for all contents on the blockchain, so an account has to have been active 7 days ago to receive a reward. If someone could enlighten me on the need of this feature on the STEEM chain, I would be grateful.

DTube Embed (concept)

Embed Demo: https://skzap.github.io/embedtube/#!/curator/m70sk5cv

I talked in the original release post about how I believe having a custom video player is a necessary feature. I quickly realised from people's reactions that they had no idea that DTube had 0 work done on the player, as the native video players in modern browsers seems to be working good. Still, I believe having a custom player comes in handy, especially for the case of the embed where I want to add some branding, a small DTube logo that leads to DTube, just how YouTube does it in their embed.

So I searched around, and ended up playing around with VideoJS, a Javascript library for displaying videos. It's pretty solid and extendable but will require some work on the design side. I'm not adding a button like YouTube to get the embed code from the video, but I might soon.

So let's say you want to include the concept DTube embed on your site, you would need to copy paste this code:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://skzap.github.io/embedtube/#!/curator/m70sk5cv" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

If you want to do it for other videos, just replace the end of the src url by the correct one for your video.

New DTube contributors

I mentioned in my previous article that I was interviewing people to help me on DTube. Well in the end, all this process was completely useless. I ended up recruiting a past colleague of mine to be the second developer: @superkoala. He has very little experience with blockchains but is a seriously good developer with good practices. We already worked together in the past without issues, and I know I'm kinda hard to work with because of my sub-par communication skills. He already started working on DTube and did 90% of the multi-language feature for this patch, which allowed me to take some time off without thinking I'm a slacker >:-)

I also recruited @hightouch, yet another French developer to work on the UI. He started playing around with the codebase and seems to be a good fit for the job. His first tasks will be to improve the user-experience by a lot, such as removing the stupid scrollbars on the homepage, and making the categories load more videos as you scroll to the right, just how steemit does it when you scroll to the bottom. He will probably be the one working on the channel page design as well.

Also I have regularly been giving tasks my turkish friend @steeminator3000 to do some boring things such as helping users in the #dtube steemit.chat channel, or doing some google researches for me. Consider him the 'jack of all trades' of the team.

Optimizations

Application Startup

DTube 0.2 added a convenience feature for me that allows me to change the settings of DTube from the blockchain directly. While convenient, it also added a good 1-2 seconds to the app loading time. In 0.3, after loading the translations, and the list of people you follow, I realized the application startup process was taking too long. No one wants to wait 5 seconds to start seeing a video, right?

Well I moved some stuff around in the code, and remote settings, translations and followers lists will now load after the application is rendered on the screen, and update on the screen when it's loaded. This is why you will probably see DTube in English before your localized translation loads from the chain.

Limiting the size of contents

I only recently discovered the truncate_body argument. This allows DTube not to load the useless part of the contents that DTube doesn't use. Such as the body, which is the markdown/html code of your normal steemit articles. This field contains A LOT of data size-wise, and getting rid of it should help loading speeds.

Upload Errors

I receive many feedbacks about errors during the upload. We were not using standard ports for uploads, and that caused a lot of people using university networks or public wifis to be unable to upload. This should be fixed as we should be using port 443 everywhere for the upload now.

There are also some timeout errors happening for uploads longer than 15 minutes. We are still unsure how to solve that on the IPFS node side. The upload page is probably the most critical one on DTube, and I really feel bad when I hear users having issues about it. No doubt some improvements will come quickly as I put my brain back on it.

Last words

A pretty solid update overall, despite some disapointments because of some STEEM limitations. I think I will try to setup a node and suggest code changes to the follow api, because the current state is clearly not at the same level than the rest of the STEEM blockchain.

The patch also took a bit longer than expected because of the time to interview and recruit developers, get them set up with the project, and cleaning up the code a bit to make it extra-easy to understand for them. Next updates should come in faster I hope.

It's already been more than a month since DTube's launch, and we are already seeing more developers converting to the IPFS+STEEM combo. For those who missed it, @prc released DSound recently and built it all faster than I built DTube originally. This reinforces my belief that doing what I did is not too hard and that many more DApps on top of STEEM will happen in the future.

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Great that you are improving the website. I love DTube and it is fantastic that you are working hard on it. But the only feature that I would need to touch DTube again is an upload bar with the remaining percentage and an estimated time. I will not go through hell again with just a circle rotating giving absolutely no clue when the upload is done. I guess you guys have 100MBit upload and don't care about that at all because your videos take 10 seconds to upload. Well, mine take about 2 hours to upload and it is always a guessing game whether the upload is actually still going on or not. It has been frustrating for someone with slow internet like me.

I totally agree with you, and this is the type of issues that make me feel bad right now. The upload process uses the js-ipfs-api package and there's not every option in it yet, such as a way to know the progress of the upload.

I wanted the progress bar in the launch but it wasn't possible. Now it's clearly the #1 issue and solving it will make me redo the whole upload page. But OK, gonna work on it now :D

Hey, we're working on getting the progress info added to the js-ipfs-api package. I'll poke around and make sure it happens asap.

Hey man, welcome on steem! Enjoy your stay here and get my upvote, you deserve so much more than that for your IPFS work!

How much would it cost for my own version of DTube? With my branding, etc?

Sadly that's one thing I am trying to avoid, so the price would be ridiculously high.

The last thing I want for the DTube concept is to end up in the hands of marketers. I believe while we need to grow it in terms of features and basically increase the quality up to a point where we get enough contents and youtube users consider switching regularly, so developers shall remain in control of the project for a bit.

However when it reaches this point and ads have to become an additional monetization feature, marketers will have to take power for the leader in this market to beat YouTube.

please one day if you will reply to me also, please make sure who I am. I have about 300 youtube subscribers and .....vies and .... :)))) lol

I guess you don't know who he is? Almost 4 billion video views on YouTube with over 13,000,000 subs between his two channels... Also check out @skydoesminecraft

Either that, or I'd rather just be honest.

that would be top awesome!! at the moment i am uploading my first video here and only God knows if it is still working or it is frozen :))))

When would #dtube videos become embed-able on Steemit and everywhere?

The dtube embedding instruction above did not work. it says it's invalid/unsupported.

What he said

What they all said

Yay, thank you @heimindanger. I'm sorry to rumble around here but you need to make some noise to get heard. Sorry that you have to redo the entire page.

I am looking forward to upload Steemy Episodes to DTube again.

Yeah, it might have been a bit rough but it is the truth! I am really waiting for this feature and I am producing videos every day. It is a quite a bit of money that DTube is loosing just by me not posting there anymore. And I am sure I am not the only one.

So you're issue is not knowing if the video is still uploading. Fair does it now that makes sense. Technically you could figure it out for your own as you just go to Task Manager or Wire Shark, check the Ethernet connectivity and see if there is a high upload usage. If not, it's pretty evident that something has happened.

For me, a progress indicator will give clarity if the upload is happening however you're problem is not clarity but rather that the upload might not work. This therefore means we need a way to prove over and over again that DTube doesn't have upload errors anymore.

I need clarity. When I look in my upload window after four hours and the circle is still spinning and there is no indication that anything is going on then I either continuewaiting or I give up. And even with my slow connection it shouldn't take that long.

then more better you change your internet provider to the fast one cause it not Dtube problem if you using a slow internet access.
your neighbour,
@cryptonewz

I live in Costa Rica and I use the fastest internet available to me. I would literally pay a fortune for good internet but it is not possible here. There are fiber connections coming to this country but only if you live in a major city. And yes, it IS DTube's problem because they loose money for not offering a loading bar. So obviously you are not my neighbour or you would suffer from the same slow connection.

Ah @flauwy I feel you pain, we have the same problem, in the same boat here on South Africa. Some areas are on fiber optic and flying the rest of us just sit and watch spinning circles.

I am feeling y'alls pain as well! I am in Gun Barrel City, Texas and it is a small city southeast of Dallas about an hour and half. I am just thankful for what I do have. It sure beats the days of dial up. I slow myself down by having 10 or so tabs open at once. Ms. Joan isn't it kind of strange that you mention fiber optics and not satellites? Also, they keep adding cell towers and fiber optic. Just makes me wonder why we aren't using the satellites that are supposed to be up there?

Yeah, it is a slow development. But rest assured that in a few years we all walk through 5G radiation wherever we go and speed is the last thing we worry about.

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Hey guys...

I really like what I've been reading about DTube. But I tried making a DTube account and wasn't able to. I am shifting away from YouTube and Facebook as of recently so I would really appreciate a platform of which to share videos. If anyone could answer some questions and help me with DTube I could reward them with sharing and promoting their posts on my minds.com account which would guarantee that thousands of people will see their post.

Thanks, Darien Parlick

https://steemit.com/@darienparlick

There is no such thing as a DTube account yet. You need a Steemit account to use DTube.

Ok, I am seriously lost here, I have Steemit, yet have never been able to even access Dtube, can anyone provide steps on which browser or why I am not able to even see Dtube at all? Whether is is following someone's link or manual typing in the address bar (firefox) nothing comes up at all? Been trying this since Aug. and would love to be adding some @WellnessHero content there. Anyone, please help! Gratitude for being nice to my technology abilities...

And if you forget you uploaded and you come to late for some reason it behaves like you didn't uploaded at all and you must upload again...

I am glad I could contribute to DTube by creating the polish translation. Have my polubienie, buddy!

Thanks for that, upvoted! :)

You are great! :)

Yes dtube will be next youtube i think!!!

Mark me words here!!!!


Steemit for ever!!!

Nice Post!!! Keep up the good work!

Thanks for sharing! ;o)

Yes it will be this is why we are moving to DTube now!

Nice, keep it up! Dtube will rock, next year! Keep up the good Work!

It may be good time to learn english. You can't afford translation of every video to 100's of languages. I think those who born after 1980 was born with understanding what function has PLAY button.

It's fairly obvious that a simple translation of the website is far from translating all of the videos on the website. Get a life buddy, internalization is important on the path of making DTUBE a more mainstream platform.

Hello stranger - english is international language. I think, it would be bigger addition to the international, planetary, or world union if someone who don't know english start learning this language and share with internet his knowledge.

Please look at all of the most influencial websites in the world, not counting the porn/adultry industry, and tell me how many of them are not translated in any way. Also, you most likely don't want to exclude older people. To give you an example, my father was born in a post-communistic society where instead of english everyone was taught russian as their second language, resulting in him only recently trying to catch up on it.

I agree with you dailydogger the world is so diverse English maybe is like the Latin in Roman Empire times but still there are so many people that does not read or speak english.... so they will benefit from this translation effort too. check the world!

How does it would be beneficial for them to learn english or use google translate? It's way more usefull

OMG a DAWGG! So awesome! Are you human free or have a slave like me? Who's a good boy? We are!! Plus, nice work...bilingual? Nice, show those humanz how it's done! Paws up!

polski?! have u ever played tibia?

BR?!

of course I did. BR BR BR BR ???

haha r u seirous? many polskies used to play back then.. great game

The future of Dtube is neigh.

Po Polsku? No to jest super!
clickthespoon.gif

I agree. this is really interesting
if you can join here

Awesome stuff!!!
Thank you

Excellent man.

Hi, great to hear about so big progress! :)

BTW, I would like to let you know, that I just added your DTube to Steem Apps directory which will be published soon as SteemProjects initiative:

Selection_151.png

I hope, that there will be many updates about your projects in the future :)

I love the timeline feature, it's useful for me!

Possible to start a progress bar? Also save partial files as it uploads? I'm on my 4th upload attempt of a 20 minute video. It's timing out each time. In the past it was always working on the 2nd attempt. Annoying since it takes 30+ minutes each time to wait to see if it'll upload properly.

I was each confused
to login to Dtube ...
me right now
still rely on
youtube ..
several times i try
still fail. I have not
understand

New UI. The current one really sucks. Sorry to be so blunt. But this is what's holding it back at this point. Please see if you can find a professional UI designer.

Dtube has a great potencial, because even if it grows as yutube, it is not gonna get advertisement as Youtube, I mean that could be the breaking point to migrate to dtube, but the platform needs keep developing to get a good maturity as youtube.

Maybe you could give more precise suggestions.
How would you see it ?

I wouldn't even know where the start. I'd delete the current one entirely though and start from scratch.

Since it's a new content distribution concept I'm pretty sure most of the focus was about making the thing work in the background that having a nice UI

I would love to see a "Complete Idiot's Guide to making an IPFS D-Tube Server." Namely because I am a complete idiot and would love to set up a D-tube server!

Feel free to contact me about that on steemit.chat, I can assist you, and I would love to have more IPFS nodes to connect to!

I'm also very seriously considering setting up one myself. I'll contact you too. Though I've seen the guide by @blueorgy which would probably be enough.

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Love the fire in your belly.

You, sir, are changing the world.

Je suis tellement content qu'on puisse embed des vidéos DTube. J'ai déjà essayé d'en incorporer une à mon projet et ça fonctionne super bien, et en plus de ça c'est beau ! Continue le bon boulot !

I'm so happy we can now embed DTube videos. Already tried it on my project and works like a charm, and it's looking good too ! Good job, keep up the good work !

Edit: je me permets de te tagger @heimindanger pour te faire part d'un petit problème que j'ai rencontré avec l'embed. Lorsque la vidéo joue il est possible de faire bugger l'interface en survolant l'endroit que je montre ci-dessous.

https://gyazo.com/679d4c699631c9062a432f859fbef16f

Le même problème se produit lorsque la vidéo est terminée, pas les vibrations mais la barre de navigation apparaît.
https://gyazo.com/a3bbda0aad8e7fa192732932a91d9af9

Je suis donc allé voir sur le site source pour embed et le problème s'y trouve aussi. Vu que c'est un problème de width ça peut se fixer facilement avec un overflow: hidden sur le tag body, à toi de voir si tu veux t'intéresser au problème de plus près tout de suite, en attendant le simple fixe d'overflow sur le tag body devrait fonctionner (j'ai testé sur le site en question). En dehors de ça, rien à redire, c'est top !

Je n'ai pas essayé de modifier le css du skin videojs que j'utilise. En effet cest pas genial que ca affiche la scrollbar.

L'embed a des tout petits boutons sur mobile aussi. Ya un peu de boulot pour rendre le truc bien.

Hi hemindanger! hope my small contribution to the spanish translation help spanish speaking users to adopt Dtube faster!!

Dtube is way better than Youtube already...

Philosophically for sure.