I have so much video from the Galápagos that I decided to group by animal. First up: sharks! The whitetip reef sharks were only about five feet long, but the largest hammerhead shark was estimated by the guide to be 10-12 feet long.

@chrispederick This is an example where I think it would be nice if Micro.blog supported videos in a similar way to images. Here is the post with embedded video on my site: chrispederick.com/blog/2019... /cc @manton @macgenie

@chrispederick Cool, I've bookmarked your post to test with later.

@manton I ended up using Vimeo so the video is embedded on my site using an iframe just FYI. That may make things tougher than supporting a direct video tag embed, but interested in your thoughts.

@chrispederick short videos with tap to play and auto mute would be awesome!

@Burk I agree! Out of interest: if they are tap to play (which they definitely need to be) why do you think they should also be auto muted? I get auto muted on places like Instagram where they auto play, but I have them set to play audio on my own site because the user has indicated they want to watch the video by clicking play. (I also have them set to loop since they are short, but may change that.)

@chrispederick may be this is more of a user setting. Scrolling through a timeline will inevitably cause accidental taps on videos causing undesired audio.

@Burk Ah, that makes sense in that context.

@chrispederick Very cool!

@chrispederick I had a conversation with @simonwoods a while ago wondering if a video-embedding iframe that supported proper/useful fallback could manage to show something useful in the Timeline (like video already does), but neither of us has gotten around to testing it :-P

It seems that Vimeo, like YouTube, doesn’t put any sort of fallback content into its iframes by default, which seems unfortunate :-(

@smokey Yeah, I used Vimeo for now since it handles all the transcoding for me, but if Micro.blog needs video tags then I'd happily switch to that (although I still think there is a gap in the market for simple short form video support). It's nice that video tags support fallback content, but I still think Micro.blog should think about supporting videos directly in the timeline alongside images.

@chrispederick @smokey Micro.blog's timeline is going to require the video tag, just as we require audio for podcast playback. However, that doesn't mean Micro.blog couldn't automatically convert common embeds like YouTube and Vimeo when reading external feeds.

@ronguest I don't know. But we can't expect all Micro.blog apps to display the complex HTML/JS often used for embeds, so we'll have to clean up the markup or just link to the video on the web.

@manton A short win could even be, if you were able to get poster images from the YouTube and Vimeo embeds as well as video tags and add some overlay like “click to play on xyz.com” so that at least there is an awareness that they CAN watch a video. Then if native video tags were playable in timeline that also encourages standard html video while supporting awareness of other videos.

@manton Sounds like a good solution 👍

@chrispederick Yes, this is the sort of thing I would imagine. I think the most important thing is for people to be aware of what following a link will mean. And Having a video show up in my timeline shouldn’t trigger YouTube trackers unless I take some action.