Just a heads up… There is no such thing as 100% visibility here. The closest thing would be YouTube, and a good chunk of people here won’t even consider watching it there. With every video I have uploaded, I have gotten at minimum 1 dm complaining about not being able to view it. It sucks - a lot. I have never been able to replicate people not being able to see stuff from catbox. This is why I moves to PeerTube with alternate links to catbox, and maybe YouTube.
I guess the long and short of it is that video hosting is incredibly expensive. Very few are willing to take that hit at no cost to the uploader. If we uploaded directly to instances, it would be incredibly unfair since suddenly the server has to host a federated file that is probably at least 20mb on the small side to potentially thousands of views, vs the small size of images.
I have been struggling with this for months, and I feel this video in my soul.
I keep going back to videos every once in a while hoping that I’ll find some new host or system or codec or setting or some sort of chicken blood voodoo animal bone sacrifice that could make it work for everyone. But every time I try, I can make it work for about 80 to 90 percent of people but like you say … we can’t seem to get a 100 percent success … yet.
It’s also frustrating … because one of the best setups involves GIF … but its a sort of weird grey area that’s impossible to understand. GIF is an old inefficient format that most services are trying to sunset so they discourage everyone from using it - yet everyone is backwards compatible to it so it works 99% for everyone because the software has been around for so long. And it’s so hard to make a decent GIF and even if you do, you never know how its going to be treated by a hosting service and degraded or messed up.
Then there’s WEBM which is a far more efficient format and makes great videos for such tiny file sizes … but not enough services make it useful, accommodate it or make it available for everyone. And it’s frustrating because I see JPGs and other images that are far bigger than a small WEBM but everyone keeps saying that videos are too big to host.
Some of the recent 10-12 second videos I created are high quality WEBM that are only 2MB in size (and I’ve seen JPG that are this size) … I tried rendering the same videos to GIF and it was work to try to get it less than 10MB and severely degrading the quality and viewing size.
So, it’s still the same as it was before … everyone supports GIF but no one wants to host it … not enough people support WEBM but it can be hosted in most places. Just about every Lemmy app, site or service supports GIF but it’s questionable how they accommodate WEBM … so we are forced to make GIF which is near impossible … or WEBM which is not universally supported.
I’ll keep trying anyway … we’ll eventually get there.
catbox seems to work 80% of the time for most people … but it seems to be hit and miss for some people
I just changed the original post from catbox to the tumblr link
A way around it I found was to attempt to create an original GIF and get it up to Tenor or Tumblr … but it’s a huge headache that is some kind of voodoo science I can figure out
just for my reference here is the catbox link again
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