04.30.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Sticking It to YouTube (Google, Alphabet) by Self-Hosting Videos and Making Galleries
Let’s weaken Internet monopolies
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:
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. █
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