vlogs

[wretchedkunt]

Title
vlogs

Short, concise description of the idea
Id love it if we can upload video blogs directly to livejournal without having to go through another website like youtube first

Full description of the ideayou already added the voice blog thing, I think uploading other videos directly to livejournal would be beneficial. We could set it so only the

Comments

[dropsofviolet]

I think video would put a lot of strain on the servers. It takes up a lot more space than a voicepost does, and let's face it, LJ has enough server problems as it is.

If this could be implemented in a manner that doesn't slow down normal services, I think it could be cool.

[azurelunatic]

Storing large chunks of data that's never accessed is little problem. It's serving it up, and serving it up without having it memcached (when it's in that not-accessed-often-enough-to-be-already-there, but still getting accessed semi-regularly, level of use) that I'm told is the strain.

I understand ScrapBook has its own cluster(s); I imagine that it would be stored in ScrapBook on those servers, and thus any resulting cluster-suck would be limited to there; it oughtn't to be worse for the main servers to serve up than the same number of YouTube embeds. Though it's a moot point that non-ScrapBook items would load fast when you have a friendspageful of stuff that's taking forever because the rest of it has loaded but the server has not coughed up all the videos yet.

[matgb]

This, effectively. What put me off the suggestion was "I can't think of any drawbacks".

I can think of many many drawbacks, especially given the site's falling over a lot as is, but it would be a good mid term plan, especially with privacy options in scrapbook.

Hell, if it could be implemented tomorrow, it might be a sales point good enough to get people using the site again.

[azurelunatic]

YouTube's security options kind of really suck. It's either public or extremely limited-access, of the x-many-invitations-and-that's-it sort. The other things I've seen people using for non-public video hosting all involve passwords, which is (at minimum) annoying for someone to take the password listed with the video in the entry and plug it in, and then there's the omnipresent concern that someone could share the password and spread the video further than it was intended to be distributed. And that's easier than having someone shouldersurf, and less apt to have repercussions than sharing your own account's password.

So (in summary) I think while you're right that those places have it all sewn up as far as the public content audience is concerned, LJ is already very good at the granular security for images, ScrapBook technically allows at least some video files to be uploaded just not streamed, and if streaming were a paid benefit it might result in paid accounts, just for the ability to stream with granular security on the video.