Audio/Video Post Support

[DeckardHoliday]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Audio/Video posts are a staple of modern social media, and the lack of support for audio/video posts, while absolutely understandable right now, is a very big missing feature on Bluesky currently.

Describe the solution you'd like

Support for audio/video posts

Describe alternatives you've considered

Maybe some dynamic player embedding with support for major video platforms? For example pasting a youtube link would build out the youtube embed player within the post.

Right now people who typically post audio/video work on other platforms have to resort to posting a still or thumbnail and linking elsewhere, which is a clunky experience for those users.

Additional context

One of the top complaints about the app from within the communities I'm a part of is the lack of gif and video post support, and with more and more people searching for a new Twitter alternative not having this feature has been a deal breaker for many people in my sphere.

[HeyItsLollie]

I've read elsewhere that GIF support is on the roadmap, and I eagerly await it. In the meantime, being able to embed external players like YouTube, Imgur, and Bandcamp/SoundCloud would be greatly beneficial. (I'm sure external embeds would help offset the exponential cost of server space required for video content storage and delivery, too)

[DeckardHoliday]

Adding an additional comment here to mention that it would be great to have an audio player so audio creators didn't have to upload a video file

(Accidentally clicked the close and comment button instead of just comment, disregard my 'marked as complete' notification)

[mschwendener]

I'd like a 'prevent autoplay' setting.

[DeckardHoliday]

An option to not unmute when focused or clicked on would be nice as well, or even to remember the volume setting. On twitter playing video is a nightmare because of how loud everything was

[mschwendener]

not unmute

And don't unmute when my phone is on silent.

Instagram will give me a heart attack one day.

[SaySayTakamura]

If is of no bother to ask, basically this means the app would have 2 video players

1 - The internal one used to play videos the user sent/uploaded DIRECTLY to the app/servers.

2 - The external one used to playe videos from links in a post.

Or would be a single video player for both cases?

[DeckardHoliday]

The main goal with the feature request is the single video player for uploaded files. The idea behind embedding videos from third party links would be to use those sites' already existing embed tools to create the embedded video. For example, embedding youtube links is not terribly difficult, you can essentially build the embed based on the url without much trouble.

There are downsides to this though, so it'd be understandable to just focus on the single player for uploaded files, and disregard the dynamic embedding idea completely

[SaySayTakamura]

The main goal with the feature request is the single video player for uploaded files. The idea behind embedding videos from third party links would be to use those sites' already existing embed tools to create the embedded video. For example, embedding youtube links is not terribly difficult, you can essentially build the embed based on the url without much trouble.

There are downsides to this though, so it'd be understandable to just focus on the single player for uploaded files, and disregard the dynamic embedding idea completely

Oh, i get it, didn't know sites already provided some sort of embed tools, thanks for the explanation and sorry for the bothering.

[fauxnik]

Is it possible to get a sense for what changes it might take to make this a reality? Would it involve any atproto schema changes?

Lack of video support is the one thing preventing me from commiting 100% to a transition to bluesky. Would be happy to lend some help if I'm able, but don't know where to begin.

[FreyaHolmer]

.gifs/video content is super central to a lot of the work me and many other game developers do, we're an interactive medium, and we love sharing the way things behave, look and move! It's one of the biggest reasons I'm not active on bsky over twitter yet. There are also a lot of art communities that would make use of this!

I also want to add, one of my frustrations with twitter is how harshly it compresses videos and .gifs, and sometimes their automatic .gif to .mp4 conversion, will both reduce quality and increase filesize - it'd be nice to have a platform that cares about making sure the resulting video/.gif has clarity! I know mastodon does this better already, for example

It might also be worth looking into some of the more modern formats that have partially aimed to replace .gifs, of .webm and .webp c:

[HeyItsLollie]

My partner and I are in the same boat - they're a game developer and 3D artist by trade, and so a large chunk of their work is shared through GIFs. I'm a 2D/3D artist and animator, there's a good chunk of work that I just can't adequately share without having to post a still image and link externally.

We do have GIF support via Giphy and Tenor, and video support via YouTube and Vimeo (plus other embeddable sources on the list). But I find myself waiting for more direct support, at least for GIFs & other silent video formats.

[SolarLune]

EDIT: Never mind, this was mentioned just above by HeyItsLottie, my mistake. Embedded GIF support would be great, along with all other video / media.

[dillfrescott]

Sorry to add to the noise, but I wanna say that video and audio support would be awesome! Its one of those things that, when I realized Bluesky didnt already have, I was like THATS whats missing!

[Mennaruuk]

I think webm is fantastic. Royalty-free, supported across all major browsers (as early as 2010 for Chromium/Chrome, 2011 for Firefox, 2021 for Safari (ugh)), perfect for both low and high quality streaming, and most importantly it is insanely efficient. A gif that is 448 KB can be a webm with a file size of 24 KB. Media-serving sites like Imgur, Giphy, Tenor, even Reddit make use of it. Compatible, high-quality, and efficient. There are alternatives, like webp and avif, and they probably do similarly well, although it's been only a few years since support for them was added, so older browser users might have trouble, though it's becoming increasingly less of a problem.

[SolarLune]

Well, video support got added and it's performing fairly well. It might be nice to document what kinds of video and audio encoding options are supported - as far as I can tell for video, H.264 works, while HEVC is not supported.