Video and Web 3.0

I’ve been playing with Web 3.0 video quite a bit, as you can probably gather from some of my recent postings. I guess this going to be a bit of a “Listicle” and I don’t intend to declare a winner, but I’m going to give you my impressions of each.

First of all – the one that is probably the best known/most famous:D.Tube

D.Tube is probably the easiest to get started with, especially if you have a Steemit account – the two are very intertwined and make cross posting easy. When you submit a video to D.Tube there is a process in doing so, and it makes things very easy, in fact the submission system is very similar to what I was describing as an idea I had some time back to @therealmaxcasey . You submit your video and a thumbnail, you can even take a thumbnail from the video if you don’t have one pre-made. The service automatically re-compresses your video into a couple of standard lower resolutions and leaves “the original” available – though I have found the original had a different hash than it came up with when I submitted straight to IPFS. It has a queue that you have to wait for before hitting the final submit, while you’re waiting you can fill out video details – the post – which can be cross posted to your Steem account. After you submit your video you can edit-info on it and the hashes to all your video sizes are available, meaning you can use it as a one-stop-shop IPFS wise and use those hashes elsewhere. The Web 3.0 version of “deep-linking” that was controversial due to “bandwidth theft” during the Web 1.0/2.0 eras but is just IPFS in the modern day.

Sadly in practice the site isn’t that great. Popular videos work fine. The servers that do the initial work seem to host the videos in IPFS, but they are overwhelmed and less popular videos tend to be choppy or not work at all. I’m probably setting myself up to be disproven, but here’s a for-now less popular video that I posted of my kid getting a gift. I’ve tried using Firefox with IPFS Companion enabled, which should, theoretically not only make viewing the content a little faster than using their gateway, but should do the site a favor by making your system a part of the swarm for that video, but alas it doesn’t often work. I’m not 100% sure who to blame for that, but after doing a little research it seems likely that it’s a security thing, that an HTTPS reference to an IPFS server is being redirected to the local IPFS server that isn’t HTTPS and it isn’t working due to security reasons. The site can be fixed to where this doesn’t happen, and perhaps IPFS Companion can also be changed to make the local-redirects work, but with fledgling technology I’m afraid local redirects don’t work out. Occasionally I have a videos work with IPFS Companion enabled which just confuses me a little further…

Content wise – D.Tube seems to be well embraced by V-Loggers and has quite an original content following. I think a lot of people who were off-put by the great YouTube censorship and demonetization fiasco have fled to D.Tube. My personal interest in Web 3.0 are best summed up by my interest in IPFS – I’m a Libertarian and believe in free-speech, I admit I often overlook the financial aspect of Web 3.0 which seems to be the more popular aspect. On that note D.Tube, being part of the STEEM network runs on the STEEM currency/tokens.

The next video platform I’m going to cover is Bit.Tube

Bit.Tube pretty much counts as the most direct competition to D.Tube. It’s web-based, uses IPFS, and automatically resizes the videos to multiple resolutions. One of the things I like about Bit.Tube is the URL to videos you post contain a hash. Here’s the same video I posted above of my kid getting a present. I took the hash from that URL and pasted it into my local IPFS gateway – I got a directory listing of all of the files dedicated to that video in IPFS. The directory structure reminds me of a DVD layout in general, quite handy stuff to have for the more technically advanced types. Granted, being more DVD like part of that content isn’t quite as easy to work with as the straight up converted media files that D.Tube offers. Unfortunately I seem to have the same IPFS Companion issues on Bit.Tube I have on D.Tube – I’m beginning to question IPFS Companion a bit despite terrific success with straight non-embedded IPFS content. Bit.Tube seems to have its fair share of YouTube refugees, but not quite to the degree D.Tube has. There is a major live-streaming section, which seems to be full of re-broadcast commercial channels. In fact BitTube seems to be relatively full of pirated content. A quick search of “Batman” turns up with Season 1 of the old TV series and the Lego Batman movie on row 1 and four other various Batman movies of the live action and animated varieties on row 2. This aspect of Web 3.0 scares me a bit. I’m all for conquering censorship, and I’m against DRM mostly, but I still believe in paying creators to create content. Also such blatant, undeletable pirated content is going to catch the attention of lobbyist and the lawmakers they fund.

One function I haven’t tried yet that stands out on this platform is a “migrate from YouTube” option. It appears as though it will automatically pull in all your YouTube content and move it to IPFS and their front-end site. This seems very promising and could be the difference in the long run from being the top dog versus second fiddle. The nice thing about Web 3.0 is you don’t have to be the winner to matter.

Functionally, Bit.Tube is easier to use than D.Tube in my opinion – the things I really like as a nerd are hidden on Bit.Tube. This is less confusing in the end. Unlike D.Tube when I hit play on a video – even a 90 minute 1080p pirated movie, I’m reasonably sure it’s going to play, and play well. Bit.Tube runs off of its own currency called TUBE. Only time will tell what this means.

Since this is originally being posted on Akasha, the next one is the one that stands out most in that context, LBRY

What sets LBRY apart from the rest right from the start is that LBRY is app based, meaning you’re not doing much with it until you download the app. This is why I compared it to Akasha – even though there is a webapp for Akasha, you’re really not using it unless you’re using the app. The LBRY app is very easy to use, I’ve used it on both Windows and Linux. The currency system is front and center in LBRY, you can charge for access to your videos, setup a tip jar, etc… When posting a video you have to bid on an address – so it costs a little currency each and every time you post something. I’m not sure how the bidding process works, I don’t know if someone can steal your address from you by bidding more in the future or not.

Once you install the app you’re good to go anonymously. If you want to do monetary things you have to prove you’re human, and much of that is tied to the Discord chat app. Some of you will already have this – especially gamers. I already had it since it’s what the officers of the Texas Libertarian Party liked to use, unfortunately I didn’t have it on the system I was using at the time and had to get it installed and logged back in to prove my humanity. Despite initially not being a fan I have to say the community is active on the chat app, and friendly. I actually brought up the app aspect during my verification chat:

The FAQ’s on LBRY state you host what you view. I asked on the chat groups what that meant – the reply was “LBRY currently uses its own P2P network as a source of data, but could be extended to others like IPFS/BitTorrent/HTTP in the future”. Indeed what this does, quite unlike the ungainly hashes of IPFS, is it puts a full copy of the video into your target download directory. I assume the app has something along the lines of a torrent client installed that re-shares that out to the network at large.

On to the nitty-gritty. That video I posted of my kid here’s a link that’s useless without the app to get you there. Here’s a long-form URL from within the app, and here’s yet a third from the target website that’s really short. I almost feel guilty having this good of a short-address. There’s also embed code – which I will experiment with by pasting it at the bottom of this article.

One of the monetary things you can do on LBRY is bid on slots. What this amounts to is a row at the bottom of the home page that’s called “Community Top Bids “. Basically they’re slots 1-10 that go to the highest bidder for placement on the front page – and advertising auction – a practice I approve of. You have to have NSFW content enabled to even view the top bids section, and more often than not NSFW content is among the top bids. The platform appears to be popular with video game bloggers, crypto miners, hardware reviewers, mostly of the gaming type, and at least one anti-liberty blogger who appears to base most of his content around putting down another journalist and making fun of the current administration.

The monetary unit is their own thing called LBC. Like the rest, time will tell if it’s worth anything. It looks to me like there’s a bunch of pre-mined LBC to sling around as bonuses, not necessarily a bad thing at first, but it does cast doubt on the end-value of the product.

As I said I’m not declaring winners or losers, I’m just shining a spotlight on what I’ve seen. Feel free to check them out for yourself, or tell me why I’m wrong and should be looking at another site instead.

Post Script:

I originally posted this on Akasha with intent to put it elsewhere later. I got a little feedback worth including:

If you're using that IPFS Companion plugin I mentioned it should help you while reading this page on at least some platforms - Steemit being one of them, it's where I put my images. If you have no IPFS support you'll be using a public gateway.

Another site that has been brought to my attention - looks nice, I haven't really checked it over yet: https://www.bitchute.com/

Also I promised to copy paste the embed code. It did nothing on Akasha, but here it is here – to be left as it falls.

(on Steemit I had to remove the code all together in order to hit post)