I really think the only thing that’s missing right now in Lemmy is more gif and video content easily accessible from the feeds. I want to contribute this content, but it seems to me like the only way to do this is by sharing links to external services like YouTube, TikTok, or imgur. Is this correct? Or is there a way to upload videos directly to lemmy that can be played without clicking on links?
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No, that is currently not supported and is not being worked on. It is planned though. Videos showing up as embedded content in posts should be available on some Lemmy clients if the link is a direct link to a video file (I think Liftoff has that 🤔). Regarding uploading videos directly on your instance, even if that is implemented (which is planned), very few instances will actually allow that. Video just takes way too much space, and recoding it takes way too much CPU/GPU power, considering how many users a single instance can have. Heck, many instances have even resorted to either using imgbb or another free hosting service to hold images instead of their instance, or limited uploads of image files to an avatar size only (100KB). Media just takes way too much space. Recompression and recoding solves that problem partially, but as noted, it takes way too much CPU/GPU cycles. Most instances are either selfhosted or through a VPS. Things like that cost money and I doubt the donations are big enough to also leave room for server upgrades or upgrading the payment plan for the VPS.
So, even if it does happen, don’t hold your breath that your instance will enable this by default. My guess is that most large (public) instances will have this feature disabled by default. Smaller private instances (instances for friends and family only) will have this feature eanbled, but you can’t register an account on those, so 🤷.
If you upload a WEBM to file hosting service like catbox.moe, you can link that as a post and it plays as a video. It only works on a desktop browser though.
Okay this is what I’m talking about, embedded video that can directly play even if isn’t directly hosted on lemmy. So I guess the way to go is having WEBM content and linking directly to the file from the post so that supported clients are able to show an embedded video. Thanks, I’ll try this out
The software that manages media files for Lemmy (pict-rs) actually supports videos now but I don’t think Lemmy itself does. Hopefully we’ll get it soon but I expect a lot of restrictions from smaller instances because video hosting is very expensive.
No but you can upload it to a video hosting service and post it
Bound question on this subject, does someone know of any Lemmy client that auto plays embedded videos?
Here’s the ones I have tried that do not auto-play:
- Jerboa
- wefwef
- Thunder
- Lemmy.world website
