Bonum Certa Men Certa

Sticking It to YouTube (Google, Alphabet) by Self-Hosting Videos and Making Galleries

Let's weaken Internet monopolies

Gallery of Techrights videos



Summary: We've entered the next step in our plan to become fully self-hosted for videos, including facilities by which to browse past videos

BACK in December we started recording and sharing many videos. Almost 40 gigabytes later, and having created .gif (GIF) animations with previews, we can now automatically produce clickable video galleries (screenshot above), more or less like YouTube sans the text and sans the JavaScript.



"Putting videos on YouTube isn't free; the cost is hidden and becoming a slave of masters like Facebook or Google is a huge cost."The implementation is extremely simple and generally occurred to me as a reasonable possibility when I was in the kitchen a few weeks ago. Rather than attempt to do anything fancy with JavaScript the previews can be done 'offline', then uploaded with the same filename as the WebM file, except the extension. We already explained how to streamline the GIF file. That was 20 days ago. Once you have enough GIF files in place, try something like this (for our setup it's all in ~/public_html/videos/):

cd ~/public_html/videos/
find *.gif > /tmp/gif
sed 's/.gif//' /tmp/gif > /tmp/gif-raw



echo '' > ~/public_html/videos/index.html while IFS= read -r line; do echo "<a href=\"$line.webm\"><img width=\"300\" hspace=\"20\" vspace=\"20\" style=\"padding: 17px 17px 17px 17px; box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #222;\" src=\"$line.gif\" alt=\"$line\" /></a>" >> ~/public_html/videos/index.html done < /tmp/gif-raw


Of course it would be nice to add header, footer etc. That would actually be the vastly easier part (with commands like cat for concatenation). Appending and prepending bits of HTML:

Gallery of Techrights videos

We hope that over time fewer people will moan about YouTube censorship (it's a form of social control media, connected closely to the US government). Instead, people should shoulder the cost and burden of self-hosting. Putting videos on YouTube isn't free; the cost is hidden and becoming a slave of masters like Facebook or Google is a huge cost. One day it can cost as much as an entire channel (getting zapped over political differences, not even obscenities). They typically use terms like "community guidelines", which include not 'offending' particular views or beliefs.

Recent Techrights' Posts

The 'Culture Wars' in Free Software Have Gone Out of Control
Social control media amplifies such utterly infantile discourse
10 Out of 10: RMS Attracts Massive Audience in Göteborg, Sweden (All Seats Occupied, Some People Standing)
a 55-second clip of his talk
The Lawsuit by Clients of Brett Wilson LLP Against Brett Wilson LLP is Officially On, It is Progressing, The 'Experts' Pick Outside Law Firms (RPC and Mills & Reeve) to Spare Them From Litigants in Person
So it is probably quite potent
Slopwatch: Plagiarism and "Linux" Articles by Bots
Sites that do this won't survive; many of them rely on slop services (suppliers) that will cease to exist after the bubble bursts
 
Gemini Links 11/10/2025: An Evening at the Fair and Fast Fourier Friday
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 10, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 10, 2025
Geminispace is Very Large
The word continues to spread and the number of participants grows
Teaser: To Compensate for the Fact Our Clients Are Terrible Human Beings Who Strangle Women (While on Microsoft's Payroll) and We Get Paid by Mystery Parties We Bombard You and Your Wife With Almost 10 Kilograms of Legal Papers
If you can't win an argument, then drown the other side with papers?
Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, This Time During National Day Holiday
This time it's China again
Staying Happy in Times of Crackdowns on Civil Society
Optimism in this sort of "new reality" or "new normal" seems like something for the irrational person
"Nobel" Exploited Posthumously for "AI" Hype, Now They Do the Same With "Quantum"
ere have been many jokes about "Nobel" for peace (often granted to pro-war people) and a fake one for "Economics" (establishment propaganda)
Distinguished Lecture by Richard Stallman This Coming Monday in Rome
After "Free software, Crucial for Freedom in a Digital World"
Links 10/10/2025: Putin Admits Russia Downed Azerbaijan Airlines Jet, More New Heat Records
Links for the day
Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
Google itself is a slop pusher these days
Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
"everyone is ditching the xbox."
Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
Links for the day
Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
The Slop Song
The train wreck marches on
LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
Links for the day
"Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
Links for the day