The site is back online, but we're still conducting maintainence based activities.
The first thing to note is there's a reduction in content, there's less movies and TV is currently unavailable. This is due to the fact we're yet to add IPFS support for a full season being uploaded over IPFS which will be done in the next day or two. Now that the update is complete, we would fairly assume as our uploaders come online and take notice things will resume as normal.
Another thing we're aware of that need not be pointed out is the site still calls everything a "Torrent" for example "PlayTorrent", "ManageTorrent", etc. This will remain this way until the new UI is finished being developed. We see no reason to waste resources in doing heavy overhaul on the current UI when it's simply going to be replaced anyways in a few weeks.
Please be patient, in the next few days we'll be introducing some more standard features to the site such as favoriting, liking/disliking videos, view count, etc.
In mid-february we're anticipating to have our public API released where an uploader will be able to automate their content addition to our site. Of course, the moderating process still needs to be done manually though
Thanks for your support as always, especially those that have worked with us through this change and have been providing content for the site.
In fact, it is amazing you guys are making use of the latest technologies. Its really nice to see such passionate and highly competent people at work. I would like to express my full respect to you guys.
I have never considered IPFS to be technology mature enough to base something on it. But I am no expert in this area, so I would like to ask you: how would you estimate the maturity level of that technology, and do you think it is going to be as flawless and polished as WebTorrents are? In general, I developed skeptic approach to everything originated from crypto (including IPFS) - meaning I agree there are great ideas, but most of them are just experimental. Now you are going to utilize the concept for real working system of supposedly big scale. So is my question - do you think the IPFS tech is out of purely experimental stage?
It's hard to say, but from my testing of IPFS we really like the potential we're seeing especially for example with creating decentralized dumps of our database/index.
I'd actually argue using IPFS has been more "clean" then WebTorrents and this is primarily due to lack of adoption at this time in the torrenting community. WebTorrent clients are a fairly new thing and most people are still running legacy clients so finding torrents with a high amount of WebTorrent seeders is harder then just finding traditional seeders.
There are some other neat project I ran into is
http://ipfs.pics which is similar to a distributed imgur. It's quite annoying when an image host up and disappears. I remember a long time ago having tons of images in old forum posts on image shack and then when they purged all those images were lost too most of which I didn't have back ups of.
I have tested it out and mkv files Do indeed work. It is cool to have the ability to take a hash and stream any video through mpv or whatever you use.
I get the feeling that purevidz is moving into not just a streaming service, but also an IPFS Media DataBase, which I don't think anyone currently has. Also, its acronym is IMDB, just an interesting find.
And to he guy above me, webtorrents is in beta and IPFS I think is still in alpha.
Sidenote, don't try and upload videos through the web app for IPFS, in the examples section is a clear way of uploading video through the terminal which works.
I haven't had much indepth testing with MKV other then the hour or two I spent tinkering with it. If you could neatly compile your test results ie upload your mkv file to a host you can hot link it, or even put it on IPFS or something and then PM me a link to a HTML file that can play it would be of great help and speed things up on our end if there was an explicit example rather then us needing to tinker with libraries and plugins like videojs and videojs-vlc.
We only disabled the main loading page, the rest of the site was still acessible but we wanted to make it clear that some content would be broken while we were doing our matainence.
are the links to the content stored on the blockchain to prevent censorship?
At this time no, but it's possible to do this by storing the hash in the arbitrary data field of a bitcoin transaction and likewise a VIDZ transaction.
However, given our adoption of IPFS there's a lot cooler and user friendly things we can do. For example example, we could have a bot that dumps our database index of magnet links an IPFS hashes in json, csv or even a neatly formatted HTML page/table and then propogate it over IPFS. A link to this could be made available on our website or even automatically tweeted to combat censorship.
There's plenty of ways we can go about this really and we haven't decided on any particular one yet. At this time, we're still considering how we can best leverage the technologies available to us.
My only question is how can you keep up all the videos without having the rights?
We're not hosting any content ourselves. Torrents are downloaded through WebRTC and WebTorrent based clients. IPFS is a... well interplanetary file system.
Lets take for example the file o48o tried to troll us with, and yes, you got me:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmcniBv7UQ4gGPQQW2BwbD4ZZHzN3o3tPuNLZCbBchd1zhThis file is also accessible on our gateway:
http://ipfs2.purevidz.net:8080/ipfs/QmcniBv7UQ4gGPQQW2BwbD4ZZHzN3o3tPuNLZCbBchd1zhAnd also available on the ipfs.pics gateway:
http://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmcniBv7UQ4gGPQQW2BwbD4ZZHzN3o3tPuNLZCbBchd1zhAs long as you have the file hash, you can access it on any IPFS gateway. It's quite amazing.
