Long-form Video

[icidasset]

I'd like to get some long-form videos on ATProto and design a community lexicon for this.

Background

• Content delivery is difficult and independent from ATProto.
• Bluesky has a CDN, but it's not open-source.
• Content addressing is a great thing and we should probably use it (but not required).

Proposal

A lexicon.community.video lexicon would contain:

• A set of URLs for various resolutions of the video. Ideally these are RASL URLs, each containing a DASL CID that can be used to verify that specific video file. But this could totally point to a regular HTTPS address.
• Various other video attributes from https://schema.org/VideoObject

I thought of using MASL and put that CID into the lexicon instead, but I'm not sure that gives us any additional value.

Concerns/Thoughts

Content creator experience

You could definitely integrate the video processing/uploading into the app view that plays and lists the ATProto videos. However, I'd like to move away from the "one platform/app does it all" thinking and figure out a good UX to do this. In other words, ideally the content creators would choose how to create + process their videos, pick a platform to host their videos on and connect those files to these ATProto Video records.

An app view could link to, for example, a web app that processes a video and uploads the result to Storacha.

Enforce video resolutions

Do we want to enforce specific video resolutions to enhance user experience? For example, ATProto videos should probably include a 360p resolution video for better load times on mobile phones. I'm inclined to say yes for improved user experiences, but also low-key no because people might have opinions on this and rather pick out a configuration themselves.

The lexicon should specify the resolution of the video though, and an app view could decide not to play a particular video on mobile because a desired resolution is not available.

Video attributes

There's a lot of possible properties to add to the lexicon. I'm not sure what to add. Could we start with the most basic attributes, version the lexicon, and go from there?