I’m not a marketer or a PR guy. I’m just a lone engineer, and I don’t feel like putting my forum app promotion through the AI ringer to make it fluffy and nice (you are welcome to read that stuff on the IF project page). So, I’ll just tell you guys what I’m attempting to do.
For the IF MVP:
I want to create an app that allows a user to drag/drop a video file into the browser. It would detect the video resolution, offer available resolutions to transcode to, offer the user the ability to chunk it to HLS files, and create metadata for the videos, and then upload those files to Autonomi.
All the user’s video file addresses (and addresses for the metadata information) would be recorded to a Autonomi native data types for tracking. The HLS manifest would also be recorded for retrieving the HLS chunks in order. The front-end would retrieve the user’s Scratchpad and metadata and present a listing of their videos to the browser for consumption/streaming/downloading.
Post IF MVP:
The goal is to set the stage for a YouTube-like experience where this is the first step. Having videos in many different resolutions and supporting HLS (yes, I realize Autonomi already chunks files) allows for the potential future inclusion of caching and streaming with standard formats and autonomic bandwidth detection to serve up different resolutions. I would also like to create a fully decentralized authentication mechanism to allow people to login and view videos on your “site.”
Anyway, thanks for reading. I intend to create this with or without getting voted to the next stage, although it will admittedly be slower if I don’t move on. If others express the need for money to see their projects to fruition, please vote for theirs over mine, unless you want to help accelerate my timeline.
I am impressed by the number of projects and how well they are being marketed, but do not think that you need to ape that. Your project is a nice niche IMO that doesn’t need hype to stand out, and if you want it to work in a browser you might consider using the dweb REST API to talk to Autonomi.
A browser app isn’t the only way to do this though so I’m curious why you have chosen that, rather than say a cross platform native app (e.g. using Tauri).
Anyway, good luck and if dweb REST is of interest I’ll be happy to assist in making it work for you. Most of the datatypes are supported so the remainder will be easy to add. I’m working on a demo web app at the moment and it’s a really nice developer experience.
I think this is a worthy idea. I like things that enable other things to be built, and this is one of those IMO. Good luck with IF!
The browser-based model is step 1. I would like people to be able to have a one stop shop to upload their videos, see their listing, retrieve and view them as the baseline, and the browser app simplifies a lot of that process. I want to allow others to be able to interact with the app without having to install it themselves, so people can setup their own hosted apps for their libraries, view/stream and proxy to it if they want to present it externally to the world. Serving up data this way also makes integration with things like HTTP caches or CDNs easier.
Browsers also natively handle a lot of the viewing/streaming aspects already, and I’d rather not have to re-invent the wheel for those pieces.
As for the backend transcoding/uploading piece, I definitely plan on making that a native app post MVP/IF, as an alternative to the hosted browser based app. I would like to implement features like: watching a directory for new video files to transcode and auto-upload, engage GPUs for faster transcoding, and queueing uploads if you are doing this totally offline.
It’s one step at a time, though, and I was trying to be realistic as to what I think I could accomplish during the IF timeframe.
Thank you all for the support. I will be working to produce my first alpha release as soon as possible. Some work has already gone on in the background before the Impossible Futures campaign, so you will hopefully be hearing from me soon!