Yes, this is correct.

Nobody has to install IPFS nodes to keep content pinned just like nobody is forced to install a WebTorrent compatible client like Vuze. You want to help the network? That's great, and you can do this by seeding content on WebTorrent or IPFS as it's common courtesy to seed the content you like because if nobody was seeding it to begin with, you would've never got to download it and watch/use it either.

If you don't want to seed anything or set up IPFS then don't. You can just use the site as we expect most users will but fortunately, not everyone thinks like this and people see the web as a community otherwise torrents would've been dead a long time ago and never caught traction.

Lastly, WebRTC is getting better with every revision of HTML

We're actually planning to address this around the same time the new UI goes live we'll be setting up our portal website purevidz.stream, while it's fine if people want to keep going directly to purevidz.net lets suppose the unfortunate case scenario that the domain is seized and we need to move to a new one like many video streaming services do, say we move to purevidz.world our portal purevidz.stream will be updated to route you to the new site.

The problem with using IPFS for what you mentioned is it's not quite at that point where it can be used for something like that because of server-side computation. However, it's not entirely impossible.

An example of how something crude but "useful" could be achieved by doing this is setting up a secondary Twitter, we'll call it @PureVidz_IPFS for sake of argument. Regularly, a bot will automatically index the content into a single *.html page which will be a simple table of the movie data and the link to the IPFS hash or magnet link. This page is then synced to IPFS and then the hash for that page is tweeted. Therefore even if the site really went offline, so long as you have any of the previous index IPFS hashes, you should have access to basically a crude copy of our database.

This can of course be heavily improved, but what I described above is a quick and hacky way of doing what you asked. It will definitely be something we consider doing in the future as we grow.


Anime is an interesting topic. From what I'm aware, there's really no good API providers for meta data about anime. The best I can think of since most people use it is MAL but the problem is their API is very dated and far from useful. We'd have to write a manual scraper that parses their HTML and uses HTTP web requests and convert it to a useful data format we can work with.

Specifically what I'm talking about is when you're uploading the content on the site right now you search the movie/tv series title and then it auto-fills in the meta data for you... it's not possible to do this at this time for most anime especially newer or currently airing ones without English dubs without doing what I described above.

Later on, we'll make a submission where a user could fill in all this information manually, but if we're realistic most uploaders won't bother doing that. Long story short, I'll look into native support for anime some time after we have the new UI up and ready to go.

Maintainence Update
Currently, we're still undergoing our maintainence process, we expect this will last 24 to 48 hours. After the maintainence has been complete, we'll give a small guide on IPFS based uploading to our site which will be quite simple.

Thanks.




We're in the process of a maintenance, this was mentioned yesterday that content would stop working during this process.



Eventually, we'll be at a point where users can upload any type of videos they want to the network, so you can upload subs in whatever language you want. As for TV/Kodi addons/Roku/etc. currently this is out of the scope of the current project but may be something we consider in the future.

Our first priority is ensuring the video submitting process, playback and management is user friendly and reliable. Given our current progress and speed a fair estimate is that VIDZ will be integration into the site will start some time in February.

I had edited this into my previous post but saw you replied before I submitted it so... here it is again:

I think you previously asked us about support for AVI/MKV/etc. while doing this with WebTorrents is currently beyond our scope as it will likely require much research, testing and very likely developing entirely new code on our end since IPFS allows us to have a direct link to the video this may be possible with using a combination of IPFS and Videojs although we haven't had time to test this yet.

Thanks for being on board with our plans

I'm not sure if there was a misunderstanding but let me try to reword some of what I said again so everyone is on the same page...

We're not abandoning WebTorrent support. Tomorrow, we are adding support for IPFS which will require some downtime to to transition and test things. We've contacted those who've been heavy uploaders of our platform and are working with them to have their content pulled off the site in the WebTorrent format and reuploaded in IPFS format. We expect most the content to be removed and replaced in the secondary format hence why we said there will be essentially a purge... the reason we're doing this is to test the scalability of IPFS in our infrastructure.

Suppose you were one of those people we contacted, you can simply refuse us and say "Sorry Pure_Vidz, I don't want to take this particular video down" or even "Sorry, too lazy" and that's fine, we're not forcing anyone to comply! After these changes content will uploadable in both WebTorrent and IPFS format.

For people who simply want to use the site rather than actually upload things these changes will greatly improve your over all experience.

It's pretty simple, IPFS already provides an indepth tutorial for this:
https://ipfs.io/docs/getting-started/

Their tutorial works fine on both OSX, Linux and Windows from my testing.


It's very much like Torrenting and infact it's built on similar technology. People can actively choose what content they continue to seed by "pinning" a file hash, otherwise for example a simple test is seed an image or video or something onto the IPFS network for about 24h, then drop your node. The file will still be accessible for quite some. To my understanding, if nobody has the file pinned the file which in Torrenting terms think of this as explicitly choosing to seed the file rather than being a leecher it's possible for a file to die. By default, when you upload content to the network yourself that content is pinned to your node thus even if other nodes don't have your content pinned and it became inactive and purged during garbage collection the other nodes will be able to pick up your file again because there's at least one node with the content pinned (you).

When you upload a file to the network and get its IPFS file hash, it's pretty much instantly accessible from gateway nodes other than your own and you can verify this by checking if you can access the file on the default gateway which is gateway.ipfs.io and content that is constantly being requested won't bombard solely you because other nodes pick up file due to recent activity.

Yes the scope of our project was never just movies and TV although its a great starting place to gain traction in terms of a user base and community.


Since our system is intended to support both WebTorrents and IPFS what format the uploader chooses is up to them. The reason we're making the changes we are is to basically under go a heavy test of IPFS with our current uploaders to see how it holds up. Whether they choose to keep uploading in that format or default back to WebTorrents is entirely up to them. We're not forcing anyone to comply. I'd mention you can run IPFS with a VPN. Just as we'd expect anyone submitting a web torrent to also be seeding their torrent, we'd expect anyone submitting an IPFS hash to be running a node seeding it / with the content pinned as well as such will be the typical standards of moderation approval in verifying if it works or not.

PureVidz is about providing meta data and useful indexing to arbitrary data on the web in this case WebTorrents (magnet links) and IPFS hashes although we're more specifically geared towards video based content.

We're not tossing anything. We're advancing our schedule on allowing IPFS based content. As we've stated once this is done, we'll be re-enabling torrent based uploading as we merge the two platforms together.
This is essentially what we'll be doing once IPFS is taken care of and out of the way.


We'll be looking alternate forms of media once we've secured implementing IPFS and WebTorrents together. The duality of the platform should make it easy when going forward if we want to add any other providers such as Sia as you've pointed out. I'd also emphasize on the response that Tweet has which is IPFS is open source which in other words you can disable the blacklist. Again, IPFS isn't intended to be out only solution as WebTorrenting once we combine the two will likely be our primary source of content for movies/tv where as IPFS will be our primary source of content for personal videos, i.e. vlogs, personal recordings, etc.

On that note, the block list is only enforced directly on gateway.ipfs.io and other gateways that have opted into the block list. It will be possible in your user profile to set your default gateway url for ipfs. Reference by an IPFS dev.

Hello everyone,

Today, we want to inform you of a rather large update to the sites main infrastructure we'll be doing over the next few days. While one of our focuses is adding new features, another is ensuring the stability and scalability of the platform. Recently, we've noticed many users have found it overly complicated to upload content using the Web Torrent system, while a small handful have found it straight forward. Another issue we've ran into is the current scalability of the Web Torrent client. While this can be addressed by our team, it would be a set back to our platform if we focused our resources currently into developing a more efficient hybrid WebTorrent client.

For our beta we were planning on adding dual support for WebTorrent and IPFS. Our current research has shown us that IPFS allows out platform to scale better in terms of reliability, and ease of use in all aspects of download, uploading and simply viewing the content. Given this, we've made the decision to currently pursue IPFS as out primary means of site content.

We've already reached out to our primary uploaders and notified of this change and will be actively working with them. During this change, there will be a content purge from the site as we'll be disabling for the time being uploading Web Torrent based content and migrating towards IPFS based content. We want to make it clear, we're not abandoning the use of WebTorrenting but rather postponing its primary use as it's a powerful technology, but will require a lot of time out of us before we can produce a scalable product using it.

What you should expect after our changes is for the site to initially have minimal to no content as our uploaders migrate to the new format and repopulate our index but in terms of benefits you should expect as previously stated increased reliability of content and it'll be far easier to upload/download content. After our infrastructure is back and running to par we can continue our reach into improving the WebTorrent client and re-enable WebTorrent uploading.

Once our primary uploaders are all up to date on our changes, we'll be working with them to put together a guide for "the every day joe" to easily add content to our network which should help us quickly grow. We feel that this update is a great step forward in making PureVidz more accessible to everyone and a good start to our planned major update.

Notice: This change will go into effect on Jan 25th where for a short time frame the site will be unavailable during our maintenance. When it comes back online, it will initially have no content and we'll be working with our uploaders to get everything back online.

Thanks.

I've manually authorized your account. Please visit the Twitter page on PureVidz and submit the links to your tweets/retweets.
We thank you for retweeting 50 of our tweets, however as per the bounty guidelines you can only receive payment for 20 of them.


We're looking into this and we'll post an update when there's more news. Thanks

It's 20 each for each category. Perhaps you were unable to authorize since we were pushing small updates to fix minor things, if you're still unable to authorize your account, send us a direct message on Twitter from your account saying something like "Hi, I'm nelson4lov on bitcoin talk my email on purevidz is something@email.com" and that way we can manually authorize your account for you.

Thanks.

Hi, thanks for reporting this it should be fixed now.

The error was being thrown due to a change we made if you were not logged in. I'm assuming you were logged in on Firefox but not on your other browsers/devices.

Please read https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1696889.msg17600438#msg17600438 for instructions on how to get paid your VIDZ for participating in the Twitter campaign.

Thanks.

Hey everybody,

Thanks to those who participated in our Twitter bounty, your reward is right around the corner! Now, so we can audit those who participated we require you to fufill a few steps.

Please visit the following link: http://purevidz.net/Dashboard/Twitter

From this link here follow the instructions on the page:

As previously stated, we will allow for a 10 day period from Jan. 23rd to Feb. 3rd for participants to submit their information. It may take us a few days up to a maximum of 4 days to audit the accounts for eligibility ensuring they met the criteria and standards of our Twitter campaign.

Payments will be issued directly to your PureVidz accounts. When payments are available, we'll post an update also including the total amount paid out to those who participated. This amount will be sent from the development fund to site wallet.

Currently, we're reworking parts of the site for scalability particularly video play back and the over all usage of the Web Torrent technology. As such, video approvals may be a bit slower as we work through this transition so please bare with us.

Our next update in the near future will contain some new features such as uploading content either anonymously as is currently done or under your username, meaning others can see the movies and shows you've uploaded. You will also be able to do such things as request a viewing (one time) fee to unlock your content. As we work towards a better infrastructure this means more meta data being available on videos such as being able to search by your favorite actors, like/dislike/favorite videos and easily share them on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Favoriting videos will be our first steps forward to the process of creating sharable playlists which makes it easy to manage related content.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and we have so much more to come but can only work so fast. We want to thank everyone who supports us and continues to support us. As you all know this will be a community driven project. The scope is narrow and easy to accomplish, its going to be you, the users, who will be the driving force behind PureVidz for years to come. One of the best forms of advertisement is the viral impact of word of mouth as we all know what it was like to set up our friends and family with their first streaming sites and services. PureVidz will be bringing things back down to the simplicity of simply searching for what you want and hitting play.

Thanks for your patience and thanks to those who continue to actively support.

Dynamic quoted us 1-3 weeks to finish the design, and then it'll take us a little bit of time to integrate it. This heavily depends on how many tweaks we require from him and his responsiveness during this timeframe. For example, take for example an image container may not have been made responsive so when we put in real content instead of the static content his design provides, it may look awkward and need to be fixed/changed.



See the 2nd last paragraph.


Dabs is not a part of our team, he is actively acting as our escrow and a supporter of the project.

Answering your questions:
1) Yes, we'll be reaching out to other exchanges such as Bittrex as we continue to grow
2) An update containing new features will be added to the site around late January, or early February. Dynamic Index's new design should be integrated some time in early February as well.


See the above update.


Thanks and we appreciate your support. To clarify this for everyone, since we've received 50% of the BTC from the sale so far from the escrows, they've reached 50% of the VIDZ we said we would give them which is 500k each. The top of the OP contains a break down of the development fund spending, and clicking the blockchain.info link will let you see the remainder of BTC the escrows are still holding.

Noted, thanks for the bug report.


This depends on how fast Dynamic Index is able to develop it, and how long it takes us to integrate it. It's hard to say at this point, but I'd estimate it will be in by early February.

To maintain torrent health on the site we will be strongly encouraging users to submit content that already is well distributed (dozens or hundreds of seeders) which will ensure the files remain available at all times.

The site itself we are looking at adding various rate limitations while streaming to avoid damaging the health of the network (for example capping download speeds to 2x the bitrate of the file). This may be something we do or dont but the idea is that if you are capped at say 800k download with 2,000k upload, even if you arent uploading to anyone because no one else is watchign the same file at the same time, you're not hammering the network and making it slow for other non streaming users. The goal with these experimental changes we're testing is to ensure that even though you would technically be a 'leacher', you wont drastically influence the health of the torrent network.

The site itself will offer the traditional magnet links to use in your preferred torrent client (which allows seeding after the browser tab is closed) and we will be working to educate our users on the advantages of using a hybrid torrent client such as webtorrent-desktop. These 'traditional' torrent users get the benefit of the organization options our site will feature while still being able to download/seed/organize their files the same way they would using any other torrent site.


We are working on a number of automated tools to improve reliability of content on the site and to auto validate/convert submitted content. This will not be something users are exposed to and many of those changes are quite simple such as auto appending custom trackers to the submitted content. We are also running various tests with scrapping torrent from the existing trackers to be used in future site changes. IE: ordering duplicate items so moderators start by looking at the healthiest torrents that have the most seeders.

You are correct that the mod queue is on hold right now while we work on further site updates. I would expect the mod queue to be re-activated in the next couple of days (monday would be my estimate although it could change)

Hello everyone,

We wanted to update everyone letting them know we've gone forward with the web design and are having Dynamic Index develop the mock ups he initially created. We're looking forward to working with him, and have let him know to post his progress here regularly so that the community can also offer him guidance and their opinions about what they like and dislike.

Dabs is acting as our escrow for paying Dynamic Index and the break down as well as our other development fund expenditures can be found in the opening post near the top.

Thanks.


Hey Spandam, please reference this link as it gives a pretty detailed of all the numbers you're asking for and then some!


One of the goals of PureVidz has always been that once it's "production ready" it should be as simple and straight forward to use as a site like Netflix. As we jokingly said, we want infrastructure to be family friendly even to those who are older and not as tech literate. An example of this is using traditional streaming websites often makes you guess to find where the real play button is and clicking on things causes popups to open. Some of those popups can be malicious websites baiting you into installing something, porn, and who knows what.



In case you missed it in our past posts, at the end of this week we'll be enabling it so that users can attach their Twitter to their Pure Vidz account and then after some time we'll be closing Twitter attaching to audit those who participated in the bounties.


Yes, we've decided to go forward with having Dynamic Index design the website using the mock ups he previously created. We've arranged for a deal with Dabs to act as the escrow for paying him for his work. A break down of how the dev. fund has been being spent is located in the OP near the top.


We'll be looking into different avenues for advertising once our infrastructure is up to par. As for Bittrex, we have not yet. We've been busy with other things mainly focused on the project development aspect side of things but we'll be looking into Bittrex later on and hopefully they'll see the merit in our project as many here do.

You linked to a html file so I assumed you provided an invalid magnet link. Most likely those using the torrent are not using a webrtc compatible torrent client. I would suggest waiting and seeing. The files we have been approving are those that play.