[AndrewUnmuted]

> Also: video is harder to share and is typically recompressed on every upload, reducing quality.

This is such a terrible standard. Using FFprobe, one should be able to determine a video's fitness for universal playback on HTML5 streaming technologies. Automating this process is easy. I've built several high-volume media processing automation platforms for video, and never has this been a challenge for me. Could you (or others) shed some light on why devs don't do this?

[g8oz]

Maybe people like you should do some evangelizing of these techniques.

[AndrewUnmuted]

I would love to! But I cannot imagine what I can say that would be unique. If people wanted to determine if a video were able to run universally on HTML5 streaming software, wouldn't they just use FFprobe and check the necessary stream metadata for compatibility upon output? Surely, these sites are using FFprobe already to determine other metadata within the video container files they receive from users?

I have always run under the assumption that sites like YouTube want to further compress all video uploads so that they can implement proprietary functionality dealing with the video content and its other important business services (ad sales, user agent scraping, data collection, etc.)

[g8oz]

>> But I cannot imagine what I can say that would be unique.

It doesn't have to be unique - when evangelizing anything redundant repetition in a myriad of different ways is most important. You never know what will produce the light bulb moment in people. A video, a talk, a Github gist, a blog entry, a Stackoverflow answer, a Slideshare, a Hacker News comment that sparks curiosity..