D.Tube 0.4: Serious UI Lifting & IPFS Backup & New Domain & More

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D.Tube 0.4: Serious UI Lifting & IPFS Backup & New Domain & More
13 hours ago
heimindanger64 in dtube
It's been a while since my last update. Since then, IPFS is regularly failing to upload or serve video files and STEEM got ddos-ed 10 times. But at least the Smart Media Tokens have been announced, so that is some good news for us. I plan to release an announcement for the DTube SMT, directly from the @dtube account, in the upcoming weeks, and will totally ignore any comment related to it until then.

This update focuses mostly on graphical and marketing changes, however I have also decided to do something about videos loading poorly, so I added a backup. Keep reading to know more :)

New Domain: D.Tube
DTube is now available at https://d.tube. As simple and powerful as that.

Domain names are more than web addresses, they are the brand of a project. When they are short, cool and memorable, they help a lot in the marketing and branding of an idea. That is why I am happy to announce that DTube has now a new home, D.Tube. When I learned that .TUBE domains were available, I contacted the folks at @livedottube, the company behind the .TUBE domain name extension. They understood my vision and decided to support my efforts with this great domain name. D.Tube was contributed to me for hosting the DTube project and it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I can now proudly say to my nerd friends that I own a 1-letter domain name, one that is faster to type and memorize, and one that will increase exponentially the likelihood of success of our community. Do not worry for links pointing to the old dtube.video domain, they will redirect automatically.

So If you want to create your own video website www.live.tube is a great place to start. I know I did and I feel very confident that it was a very good decision.

Presentation page: About.D.Tube
This is the first thing DTube competitors would do most of the time. A webpage explaining the project. It was badly lacking here, considering the app doesn't include many texts or explanations for things. The page was made by @mkt. It features many small features that are useful for the all around DTube experience, such as a FAQ, an official DTube blog (which is resteems of my own DTube articles at the moment), a STEEM price ticker, and links to our community channels (crowdin, github, discord, steemit.chat)

Upload Shenanigans
On behalf of all actors responsible for the situation, I would like to apologize for anyone who had their uploads messed up. I did a lot of digging around to find out the problems associated with the upload page, to end up understanding that basically IPFS takes a lot of time to properly add a file to the network, especially when you don't use a SSD, and deal with large files like DTube does. When two users try to do this step at the same time, one of them gets thrown an error (usually the second one).

For now you have a progress bar so you can see if it is working or not. Sadly, I cannot promise that your upload will have a 100% chance of working, but we are currently developing and testing a new uploader that should hopefully solve these issues, and enable new features such as automatic video encoding.

Adding WebTorrent as a backup
Any DTube user can notice how sometimes IPFS just doesn't load any videos, except maybe a few popular ones. At times, new videos take hours before being viewable, and even the pictures wouldn't display. I talked with IPFS developers and they are working on a fix (probably in the next IPFS version), but we don't know when this is going to happen.

This is why, starting from this patch, you will automatically seed videos on Torrent while browsing DTube (if your browser supports it). We will use this as a backup. Then, when you try to load a video, if IPFS is not loading or stuttering, then the video will try to play from Torrent if there are seeders available.

How can I help DTube and seed video files?
1- People who watch a video on DTube, automatically seed the video inside the browser. This should increase the number of seeders on popular videos. Seeding multiple files inside the browser would be a dream, but it eats up the ram really quick and isn't really a possibility right now.

2- WebTorrent provides an easy to use torrent client that you can download on their official website. Installing it and simply downloading the video from the magnet link on the video page, will be enough to enable you to seed to DTube users, without needing to keep the DTube website open. I recommend this option to all serious content creators, who want to make sure all their videos load smoothly.

3- I have personally modified this torrent client, to add some options to automatically fetch magnet links written on the STEEM blockchain. You can set a % of magnets to fetch, or simply a list of authors that you want to help. This allows you to passively help DTube without having any button to click. This is obviously what would help DTube the most, however it will probably require a decent internet connection, and a bit of storage space.

I would love to see this help videos load better. In theory, here you will be downloading directly from anyone around the world, at the same time, instead of downloading the video from a single IPFS gateway. So it should work better, as long as we have people seeding. We will see how it goes.