Bitcoin Forum

Videos are increasingly part of our way of communicating. Although some of us like to watch more or fewer videos on the most varied topics, we have to agree that in many cases they are very useful.

In this sense, I thought: couldn't the forum also accept videos?
Of course we don't expect to see Oppenheimer - 3 hours of film - through the forum. However, short informative videos or tutorials could be interesting.

Does this make sense to you?
I spoke to theymos and he made the following observation:


What are your opinions? Should it be possible or not to watch videos via the forum?
If so, do you think it should be possible to share videos from any platform, or just from specific platforms? And what would be the maximum time a video should take to be available here?

If you want to offer video hosting via talkimg, you are asking for trouble. If this is only about bitcointalk accepting videos, i.e. giving us the possibility to see videos without leaving a forum, then yes, I would really love to see it. I would love to see video embedded here the way images are, i.e. shown directly without necessity of clicking on any kind of icon.

I have nothing against that idea, because they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and adding a video to the forum in a quick and easy way might be a step in a positive direction. However, I think that such a feature should somehow be limited to at least the Member+ rank, because there should be no doubt that otherwise there will be those who will abuse such a feature.

On other forum there is an option to add videos directly to the post, so it might be good to check how it's done there.

I sometimes post a video in the following form, but it takes some time, and some users don't even realize that the link to the video is hidden behind the picture.

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/03/29/VQajW.png (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSKimRE6qmY)

If a link to a video is clickable, as it is now, forum members can click on it and watch the video and I don't feel annoying or uncomfortable by clicking to watch a video after reading a short description to introduce what that video is about.

If an image attached to a video, affects loading a page, a thread, I feel it is uncomfortable.

I don't see difference between clicking to watch a video and watching it directly on the forum so why do we need to watch it directly on the forum if it can bring some side effects.

I love the idea of watching a video in the forum but I think adding a video to a thread or post should come with a whole lot of rules because if there are no rules to posting videos I believe some calibers of people would just see a video of there interest whether it has to do with the forum, bitcoin or not they will just post them here just as the social media, or they can even be people who will begin to promote there youtube channels and videos in the forum hence it could lead to a defeat in the initial idea of video posting here in the forum.

I think rules should be made on what videos are to be posted here, either from a certain platform or it should be of a certain category (like bitcoin related) before it should be posted here.

And from my perspective I think a 1 minute video is too long for a forum like this because it will some how look like social media reels, then it will definitely defeat it's concept, perhaps a 30 secs video is more likely to be okay by me. Or perhaps we have to go with Theymos idea of clicking and displaying via JavaScript into an embedded video, or more like a new tab, just to display the video.


@Lucuis got it all right. There should be a limitation on who can post a video in forum because if not so there will be a lot of abuse and I can smell that already. And for me I think member rank is quite easy to achieve for one to post a video hence it should be of senior members rank or full member+  to protect the interest of the forum.

I guess this would be depending on the video content while if its a tutorial it should be here for a longer time maybe a year though depending on the cost for keeping it

I support Lucius statement on the restriction of forum members below member from it, I guess a maximum of 10mins might not be bad since after all its for tutorial but to be frank there should be some video content restriction because there are somethings some of us personally may not like to see.

To be frank not everybody may click no a link since majority of us here are privacy inclined while they use a virtual hero of themselves to access these sites but I guess if the video is uploaded here they might not need to go  through such since sometimes it may skip their mind to remember to watch later.

Careful people will not carelessly click on link but if they do it, they accept risk.

Forum itself detect and block suspicious links but if a poster attach a Youtube video link, you are curious, don't mind about privacy, click on it to watch that video is not bad for you.

Virtual hero, what's this?

Sharing videos or uploading it DIY is always a best way to express interesting content that you see outside the forum. This is also very helpful on beginners & help board that is frequently asking for help and tutorials on different matters. Screenshot is good but having a screen record is more efficient to share easily what we are trying to express.

Although I really like the current version of the forum which is easy to load and refresh but having a feature to import or share video that you can watch here without the need to go on the source link is the best for me.

Yes for this if possible but make sure that video is not automatically played once browse just like on social media. 

I agree with this, otherwise the feature surely will be abused.


I'm doing exactly the same if I want to show a video. To be honest, I don't understand why anyone sees this way of showing videos inconvenient. And if you want to watch a particular video, is it so hard to click on the link or linked image?

I'm just happy with how this forum woks and afraid of some unnecessary "improvements" that can potentially damage the forum.

as long as the video doesnt autoplay im good with it. i like static pages. and ill hit youtube for videos if im in the mood

I am not sure that I recognize the video as part of the communication here on the forum. Watching videos makes me completely passive in that communication, plus it's mostly quite broad and for something that I read in 30 seconds, it's most often packed into a 2-minute video. Seems like quite a waste of time to me.


Just imagine spammers with this capability. You have to watch the whole video to be sure that it is a useless thing.  :(

A posted link is enough if someone wants to hear more.

With the forum that sometime went down and it takes time for the forum to load the images even though it just 2MB, the forum isn't ready yet to allow embedded videos. Usually the size of 1 minute video around 50~ MB, although we can compress it or reduce the resolution, but I don't think it's good to watch an blurry/low quality video.

At least the forum still allow GIFs, even though it's not effective to be used as tutorials.

https://imgvb.com/images/2024/03/29/05230b434ed8b1fdaa4087de080ba14f.gif

Mainly for aesthetics, Talkimg could maybe offer a way to "make a video thumbnail" of an image that is uploaded, which would darken the image a bit and overlay a basic circle/play button, then provide that as the uploaded image which can be linked. If it asks for a direct URL to the video itself during the upload, it could also provide the BBCode to put the image & link together for a post.

Still would require a user to grab an image/screenshot of the video they'd want to use and upload it, as I assume talkimg would not want to try grabbing thumbnails of videos themselves. In any case, there should probably be a disclaimer added with these types of image/links letting users know that clicking would take them to a 3rd party site.

edit: I think this could potentially work for a [video] tag as well, but the forum would need to have a template image that gets put over top of any [video] tag. The video tag would essentially then accept an image URL as a thumbnail, and a video URL.

This is just you creating an online version of someone/character you may wish to be address as online, base on username, style of chatting and others

The main thing to ask yourself is Why do you need this feature and what use will it do above all that is already available?

Tutorials and informative videos, there are loads available on the internet. Of course you can suggest an "Official" bitcointalk-community driven video set for newbies who seek information.

In my opinion, uploading such "Series" should be on video hosting sites like Youtube or so. Images already on this forum ends up being an eyesore (no offense to anybody).

Countless times on this forum, users have actually made reference to some helpful video links that were not directly hosted on this platform but on other social apps like YouTube, Facebook, Ticktock, etc.

Last year, there was a topic I created in the gambling section in which I included a video that was saved in my gallery, but since I couldn't upload it directly to my post on this forum, I had to upload it on a different website where I was now able to copy the video link. 

Most people cannot actually understand a written article or piece of content as well as they will if it were a video they are watching. So, I agree with @Lucius that "a picture is worth a thousand words.".

This idea is cool to me. 

Since it is better to make use of the video link than the video itself, this will help us from having the hectic attempts in trying to load some video contents from their respective platforms, i like it the way this forum operates, not only that, when you're logging in, you wont have any delay on loading the content because there is no video uploads allowed that may be part of other reason for a slow in loading the bitcointalk page, this alone is enough reason.

This is a nice idea joker_josue it will definitely help make some things easier to understand via video illustrations. Since everyone is of the opinion they don't want a clickable video, or an autoplay setting, my suggestion is if possible, we can create a video hosting site like TALKImg but it would work like an iframe function on this forum. In that way you have full control over the video without leaving the page.

Plus I think there should be a restriction for it's use probably full member rank upwards.

I prefer the embedded videos to be from a platform that doesn't force users to view an ad or two ^{[YouTube (e.g. standard videos) is a perfect example of a platform that should be avoided]}.

I'm not sure if the length of the embedded videos can put significant stress on the resources of this forum or not ^{[especially since they're hosted somewhere else]}, but I think a maximum of three minutes would be more than enough for covering a lot of things.

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IIRC, there were security risks with embedding such things, so I'm wondering what changed.

not all forums do have this kind of functionality but having a video that can be played without going out of the forum will encourage deeper discussions. videos are good topic starter, especially with the news that is happening all over the world or even just the videos of crypto influencers, they are increasing too.

and most of all why it's a great idea is because we can finally post memes from twitter and youtube here once it's put into action.

This is one way to solve it. Another way is to put the link under then screenshot like

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/03/29/VQajW.png (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSKimRE6qmY)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSKimRE6qmY

I guess the topic is about embedded video? In my experience, from some other forums, it does not look good visually and in some cases it's annoying too. 

That's correct.
Some may remember the not-too-long period when animated images were allowed as avatars and some campaigns started using that.
It soon became rather annoying and soon enough theymos no longer allowed them.

Now just imagine what would happen when a lot of people would put in videos, especially on auto-play...


So imho the proposal can work only without auto-play (as already said).
And really, I don't know why would that be needed when somebody can add it just in the way Royse posted the previous example. After all, the videos are not hosted here anyway.

I can only imagine how much work will be added to the moderators if this feature is added to the forum. Because in order to moderate such posts, moderators will need to review all these videos.

I think it's a good idea and I fully support it. I believe it should be possible to watch videos via the forum and I believe you are the right person to have a platform that may host the videos or make a site similar to TalkImg where users of Bitcointalk should be allowed to host their videos and then they may share the links on this forum.

I believe a JavaScript embedded pop-up of a video should be a nice feature to have on this forum. I believe someone like PowerGlove may help to create such script for the forum and if it's accepted and implemented by Theymos then it would be much helpful for the members of the forum.

I know this forum seems way behind the times in many aspects, but I hate it when I go to some mainsteam-y media site and there's some kind of video that starts playing.  No doubt there could be an option to not autoplay videos, but I'd just rather not see bitcointalk go that route--and it sounds like Theymos isn't leaning in that direction based on his response.

That compromise solution he offered up, the one with an icon to click, might not be a bad idea.  It hasn't escaped me that a lot of the younger generation prefer watching videos to reading, so it's probably not a bad idea for the forum to take a baby step out of the stone age.  And hey, I used to watch a lot of crypto videos and would probably find specially-marked links to them useful.

While someone has a problem of watching videos in the forum. Myself I sometimes wish to communicate here using a voice note, especially when I do not want to type much. I would be happy if that is added than video. On a second, many people here do not have English as their first language which makes it difficult to make connected sentences. Let's assume audio is added, with poor English and different ascents, it's gonna be a nightmare...LOL

It'd be comfortable to have an "Upload file" option in general, not just limited to videos (why staying in videos when you could broaden it beyond?). Certain limitations could exist, such as the minimum rank required to be able to upload, or account storage limit (with over 1250 bitcoin in reserves, I'm pretty sure the forum can handle a few gigabytes for each user).

The problem is legal. If a user uploads illegal content, then unless files are actively monitored and reviewed, the forum admins are legally responsible. To be honest though, this would be one of the least important features to account for, if I had to choose. There's no particular problem with uploading a file to a temporary file hosting service whenever needed, and I rarely see non-newbie users who would want to share with us a video.

I feel like neutral on this, as I always view the videos on their platform e.g. vimeo or youtube instead in any third-party sites but having it in here is nothing to worry and still okay as embedded video.

On other forum i used — a general forum like reddit, the admin there create a separate website (like a dummy website) for images and videos to embed on that forum, I guess that was his third website because the other was taken down for obvious reasons. This is to avoid legal complaints, copyrights, etc. Of course, the embedding video is also possible on that forum too.

Before adding a new feature, I would imagine the admins check for the demand on that feature through users exploring other more difficult routes to achieve the same result. With videos, I don't see an obvious demand for it, I've hardly ever had to embed a video into a post I was making and also come across posts containing custom links to videos sparingly.

Without much real users, if an easy to use feature is added, it would be abused, necessitating the need for stricter moderation, adding to the workload of the mods.

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It would be a cool feature to have but I'll vote No on it, cause of the obvious drawbacks and that it doesn't improve communication on the forum.

Thank you for your feedback.

A common point of view was noticed, which is very good in a community: the idea is good, this capability would be interesting, but in reality it would not be very useful for the dynamics of the forum.

The link continues to be the best way to take the reader to the video you want to present.  ;)

I don't want embedded videos. If there's a video link, I'll open it in an external window, and either play it on the side, or full screen. Many other sites that have embedded videos don't work for me, because I don't allow the tracking cookies. I'm okay without working embedded videos.
It gets worse if it's animating by default. My browser is set to animate GIFs only once, and ads are blocked. Whenever I visit a website without those default settings, I'm instantly surprised and annoyed by the amount of animations on my screen. I like a "quiet" screen, and anything that moves distracts.

I refuse to watch ads, and the day my adblocker doesn't block them anymore is the day I stop using Youtube.

I hate voice messages with a passion. Suddenly it goes from a screen to sound that goes all around me.

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How about limiting it to only certain boards? Or even just one, so the rest of the forum stays nice and quiet.

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There's another thing I hate about "video tutorials": whenever I need something, the first thing Google shows me is a bunch of Youtube videos. To find what I need, I need to watch some guy film himself, tell me to subscribe, bla bla bla bla bla and finally (if I'm lucky) I get to see what I needed. I miss the days when a "Howto" was just written text with images, so I can quickly scroll through it to find what i need. Video is very time consuming.

Some youtubers did not add a text description of the video content or a summary of important points in the video.

To get what we need, we have to watch a full video that is sometimes too long and waste time for watching.
Even we get what we need, if we don't type it in our own note, in future, if we need that information again, we will have to watch that video again, another waste of time.

I like to read books, blog posts, articles than watching a video.

I see some upsides to having videos directly embedded in forum posts, but like theymos pointed out, there are definitely some privacy concerns too. So, I'm on the fence about it.  Personally, I don't mind the occasional click-through to another site to watch a video, it's not a huge deal.

Maybe the devs could brainstorm a solution that offers the best of both worlds?  A pop-up window that plays the video within the forum could be a good compromise.  That way, you still get the embedded video experience, but without potentially compromising your privacy by having videos load automatically and sharing our IPs with third-party sites.

Lucius's trick is a smart solution but it's not very practical because I have to leave the website and watch video on another platform. For a smooth experience, it will be good if we are able to embed videos from popular platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter... and if they'll be embedded with lazy image loading. Lazy image loading will not slow down the website.
I mentioned those websites intentionally because they censor violence and illegal content, so forum wouldn't be under DMCA complain. If we allow videos from any source, then moderators will probably have to work very hard.

The forum still allows flash videos which does not work in 2024. The admin of the forum does not feel that it should be upgraded, being the only forum of Bitcoin. It would be amazing if there was a fix to show videos within the forum. I also doubt that is possible within the forum, Talkimg moving forward to become a source to display videos will be great, it will cost a lot for sure.


That does not look presentable! That kind of predicament will not give an assurance to anyone unless a rank holder like you presents it. I have not been able to do such a thing with my posts or topics as I am only a small rank holder. If there is a way to show the video within the forum by only those who are ranked Sr Member and above then it will be good. There are a lot of users who have been awakened in my signature campaign and these guys were not a part of the forum when the merit system was implemented. If you give access to full member and above then we might see a lot spam content in the forum.

Totally agree, I miss that simplicity the same.
90% of the content of most of these videos is useless and does not add any information to what is really needed.

Watch a few seconds at the beginning, fast forward with 10x, 20x or 30x even more, watch last few seconds. A 10 minutes video will not take more than 1 minutes to get a rough idea about the video. Is moderation too hard :-)?

I imagine a good problem though. If the video is hosted on Bitcointalk server then watching it on the TOR browser is nearly an impossible job LOL. For a 10 minutes video I will need half an hour to finish it :-D.

I know you're trying to bring creativity and dynamism into the mix, even your past works have shown your good intentions. I've nothing against such conception. However, I'm of the opinion that having videos play in the forum will distract and derail topics of discussion. We know how how these things are easily hijacked. User A sends a video to buttress their point, User B sends a similar video as a follow up but which is slightly different from the first. It goes on and on like that and the import and storyline begins to lose its relevance. Besides, videos are more addictive than comments and we often find ourselves drifting while on them.

In addition, I think this forum should continue to make itself distinct and not see itself as copying what others are doing.

I always have many tabs open, and often several windows. One more or less doesn't matter.

Let's not add mass tracking to Bitcointalk :o
I've blocked 4 out of those 5 including their advertising domains from my hosts file. See StevenBlack / hosts (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) to conveniently block them. Life is better without social media.

DMCA is for the ones hosting it, not for embedding if it's hosted elsewhere.

Sounds terrible, and not smooth. I've been in forums that allowed embedding YouTube videos and it didn't go well. Think of a video being posted once and quoted 5 times. The page will be on an endless loading.

It's also bad for privacy. Right now, bitcointalk proxy protects the user's privacy by passing all image requests through ip.bitcointalk.org. You can't do that to a YouTube video. Google will have to know who's watching. That's why DuckDuckGo allows you to view images (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=example+&t=ffab&iax=images&iar=images&ia=images) privately but not videos (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=example+&t=ffab&iax=videos&ia=videos).

If the forum would enable this feature and then limit it to only one board, I think that something similar would happen to us as with the Press board, which only two users turned into their private board for spamming links. Therefore, I think it would be better if such a feature were available in most boards (some may be exempt), with the rule that low ranks cannot use this feature.

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I honestly don't understand what you meant with what you wrote. Are you actually saying that you can't do what I did (the way I presented the video)? You have a Senior rank and can easily post pictures on the forum, but what you lack is a way to do it. This option does not exist in the post options and you have to create it yourself, but this is how the code looks, so you can try it.

it definitely will.. hosting videos on a different site isn't totally free; but that's not even the problem -- atleast not for a start... Every development normally requires a headstart.

What  about the controls
I think it should be focus auto play or are we suggesting  using a play button if interested

The idea of the forum supporting the addition of videos is a good one but there should be a certain restriction for newbies in using the features and the forum should prevent autoplay of the video and download which is so annoying whenever I use some online website.
Another one is to prevent the user from using the video features to send malicious attacks which could lead to lost of crypto.

Video's are very educative especially when you are trying to learn a new thing or something you know but not familiar with.

I recently join one challenge on the forum known as " 100 push-ups A Day Until Bitcoin is $100k"
At first when I started the challenge I was not doing the push ups correctly so I decided to go on YouTube and I found a push ups video that helped me and I started doing it correctly in a proper manner.

So either ways if Bitcointalk accepts video is fine it will help more in pass quality information but since is not provided yet one can always visit YouTube like I did and get any information and also post the link in the forum so people can click and it will lead them to were they can watch it.

If there are people who find a topic hard to understand then a video of instructions would really help that person. Although I am not against the idea of bitcointalk accepting videos but we know that there are people who make videos where the information or content of the video is fake or having wrong information which doesn't do any good at all in my opinion. There's also the situation where of someone quoted a psot with video then it will load unless it is set not to automatically play or videos only show when it is posted and won't show when someone quote the post with a video.

I just think that accepting videos here would breach the gap between here being a community and being a social media platform, of which is no different from TikTok and Instagram or YouTube.
I like this conventional idea that has somehow taught many great lessons and has provided insight into future prospects. If this gets turned into an app that be downloaded freely, the infusion of video playback options wouldn't be a bad idea still.

I personally like the idea of having a way to embed some video from YouTube or other platform here or directly uploading it and keep it static until someone here decided to watch and play it here on the forum without redirecting to a third party website.
Though, since we are talking about videos being used for educational purposes and in order to make Bitcoin information to it more widespread amount newbies in the forum, then I must point out the obvious and say such a feature is likely to be used by some members to share videos with devious quality and could be mostly untopic.
I know was a matter of fact, such feature to embed videos on the forum would be heavily used in the politics & society section of the forum to spice up political debates and even misinformation/ conspiracy theories.

Rather than seeing people posting mostly educative and useful tutorials and technological news about Bitcoin and alternative currencies, this would be a boost for ANN designers, people from the Off topic section and some advertisers in the forum.

It is kind of similar to what people used to say about the use of deepfakes to influence polítics and governance, when in reality artificial Inteligence and deepfakes are being overwhelmingly being used to produce pornography.