I promised I would make a post about the next site update when it happens to detail all the changes, though admittedly this is a bit impromptu so some things may not be fully up and running, but that's how it goes I guess.
Video Player / Playback Improvements
The video player got an overhaul to fix some quirks in behaviour and improve the overall experience. The time code and duration is now displayed, and a litany of other minor UI bugs have been fixed, such as some context menu options not working as they should.
We also have on-demand encoding, so when a video is still being worked on in the background, Project Vinyl should still be able to play, albeit at a reduced quality until the final format has been produced.
Video Processing
The way we do video processing has been completely redone to hopefully improve speed and performance. It will now generate all the formats at once where possible, so there should be less waiting for a download to become available.
Description / Sources / Downloads
The above also applies to video descriptions and downloads. The layout has been overhauled to make it a little more pleasant to navigate. Each section can now be toggled on and off, so you can hide the description or the tags (hold CTRL to only toggle one).
Videos also can now have more than one source provided, similar to tags, and bugs have been fixed regarding updating the UI after changing a video's tags.
Paging / Sorting / Search
You may notice a few new options on forums and comment threads, as well as search pages. Everywhere that you have pagination now has built in ASC/DESC sort buttons that allow you to reverse the order of comments or search results.
You may even see Derpy make a few more appearances around the site.
Usercards / Feeds / Subscriptions
Usercards got a minor visual overhaul with a new opening and closing animation, and some fixes to better handle situations where network connection is lost.
Feeds have been entirely redesigned to present a more valuable experience. They will now show you all the tags you follow with the option to remove them from your feed, videos are still there, and now you will also see users that you're following.
To go with that, any user with a verified artist tag will now have a button on their usercard and profile, as a quick and easy way to add their artist tag to your feed.
Automatic Imports
We now support importing videos directly from YouTube. What this means is that if you go to the /watch?v=public endpoint, it will no longer just redirect to a video we already have uploaded. Now, so long as you're logged in, it will attempt to fetch the video and all of its details from YouTube directly.
You will also be able to provide a video url on the upload page to have it fetch and prepare a video from there.
Integration for fetching videos from The Pony Archive is also planned for after Zizzy has finished everything they need to do for migration. Until then, we will remain in read-only mode, unfortunately.
Misc Other Things - Styling fixes, dark theme improvements, overall polishing things up a bit - Account creation should function a little better now, and emails should send as I believe I found the way to make google stop interfering with that. - The BBCode parser for comments had been rewritten from the ground up, hopefully without breaking anything - Fixed some layout bugs on Chrome-based browsers (footer, narrow scrollbars, in several places, etc) - Notifications have been fleshed out a little - Moved the failed network message to a less intrusive toast in the corner - You can now dismiss site-wide announcements, and it will actually remember that. Wow! - Fixed searching from the main list of videos - The global search now has the option to choose between just a video's title, video metadata with full tags support, or other things. - Fixed certain videos being inaccessible due to their id being 404, 500, or some other http error code...
Video Player / Playback Improvements
The video player got an overhaul to fix some quirks in behaviour and improve the overall experience. The time code and duration is now displayed, and a litany of other minor UI bugs have been fixed, such as some context menu options not working as they should.
We also have on-demand encoding, so when a video is still being worked on in the background, Project Vinyl should still be able to play, albeit at a reduced quality until the final format has been produced.
Video Processing
The way we do video processing has been completely redone to hopefully improve speed and performance. It will now generate all the formats at once where possible, so there should be less waiting for a download to become available.
Description / Sources / Downloads
The above also applies to video descriptions and downloads. The layout has been overhauled to make it a little more pleasant to navigate. Each section can now be toggled on and off, so you can hide the description or the tags (hold CTRL to only toggle one).
Videos also can now have more than one source provided, similar to tags, and bugs have been fixed regarding updating the UI after changing a video's tags.
Paging / Sorting / Search
You may notice a few new options on forums and comment threads, as well as search pages. Everywhere that you have pagination now has built in ASC/DESC sort buttons that allow you to reverse the order of comments or search results.
You may even see Derpy make a few more appearances around the site.
Usercards / Feeds / Subscriptions
Usercards got a minor visual overhaul with a new opening and closing animation, and some fixes to better handle situations where network connection is lost.
Feeds have been entirely redesigned to present a more valuable experience. They will now show you all the tags you follow with the option to remove them from your feed, videos are still there, and now you will also see users that you're following.
To go with that, any user with a verified artist tag will now have a button on their usercard and profile, as a quick and easy way to add their artist tag to your feed.
Automatic Imports
We now support importing videos directly from YouTube. What this means is that if you go to the /watch?v=public endpoint, it will no longer just redirect to a video we already have uploaded. Now, so long as you're logged in, it will attempt to fetch the video and all of its details from YouTube directly.
You will also be able to provide a video url on the upload page to have it fetch and prepare a video from there.
Integration for fetching videos from The Pony Archive is also planned for after Zizzy has finished everything they need to do for migration. Until then, we will remain in read-only mode, unfortunately.
Misc Other Things
- Styling fixes, dark theme improvements, overall polishing things up a bit
- Account creation should function a little better now, and emails should send as I believe I found the way to make google stop interfering with that.
- The BBCode parser for comments had been rewritten from the ground up, hopefully without breaking anything
- Fixed some layout bugs on Chrome-based browsers (footer, narrow scrollbars, in several places, etc)
- Notifications have been fleshed out a little
- Moved the failed network message to a less intrusive toast in the corner
- You can now dismiss site-wide announcements, and it will actually remember that. Wow!
- Fixed searching from the main list of videos
- The global search now has the option to choose between just a video's title, video metadata with full tags support, or other things.
- Fixed certain videos being inaccessible due to their id being 404, 500, or some other http error code...