9 ms·

Vidly (YC S08) first to launch HD video on Twitter

63 points by chrysb 17y ago

jraines 17y ago
A suggestion for Vidly: please make a video's view count available through the API. I just went with YouTube + bit.ly for a video & twitter related thing I'm doing because I have to have access to the view count.
- danielrhodes 17y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion! It will be in the next push, later today.
  - dilanj 17y ago
    Real-time feature releases, nice work Dan!
  - jraines 17y ago
    Awesome - thanks!
DarkShikari 17y ago
Someone should tell them to upload their encoder; they're apparently about 4 years out of date, which would explain why their video quality is rather subpar for the claim of "HD". x264 - core 57 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2005 - http://www.videolan.or g/x264.html - options: cabac=0 ref=3 deblock=1:1:1 analyse=0x3:0x113 me=hex subm e=5 brdo=0 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=0 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone =21,11 chroma_qp_offset=0 threads=12 nr=0 decimate=0 mbaff=0 bframes=2 b_pyramid =0 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=3 wpredb=0 bime=0 keyint=60 keyint_min=25 scenecut= 40(pre) rc=abr bitrate=2000 ratetol=1.0 rceq='blurCplx^(1-qComp)' qcomp=0.60 qpm in=10 qpmax=51 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 pb_ratio=1.30 Even Youtube does a better job keeping modern than this; there's no excuse for startups to be using outdated technology.
- alain94040 17y ago
  I'm not an expert, but has H.264 encoding improved that much in 4 years? Usually, it's the standard itself which provides the quality (and H.264 is better than Mpeg-4).
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    As the lead developer, I can say quite confidently that the encoder matters a huge amount more than the standard. See: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/quality_chart1.png http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual... http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 As you can see, a bad H.264 encoder (e.g. Apple's) can barely compete with Xvid. The entirety of my work on x264 is contained in the past 2 years of development. The psychovisual optimizations alone probably account for at least a 50-70% improvement in compression quality.
    - wensing 17y ago
      "As the lead developer..." Great example of why I love HN (and IRC).
- chrysb 17y ago
  Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it. We're always open to feedback and you should know that the YC nature is to be constructive and helpful in our community of startups and hackers. Thanks!
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    Your x264 encoding library is quite outdated (read: years). Newer versions are faster, more efficient, and give higher quality output. You can get the latest at http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary . If you need any assistance, drop by #x264 on Freenode. I'm always surprised by how video startups--whose most important technical resource is their video conversion system--don't seem to do sufficient research into how it actually works (or for that matter, how well it actually works). This may be because of the assumption expressed in posts like http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713: that all software is pretty much equal and it doesn't matter what you use or how you use it. Then again, I can't be too harsh, because you at least used open source tools instead of Flash Media Encoder, so you must be doing something right ;)
alain94040 17y ago
Can someone explain the rationale behind such a service? Twitter and HD video? I must be showing my age, but what is the point? I'm genuinely curious to understand what kind of company they are trying to build. Do they want to take down youtube? Someone please spell it out for me.
- alaskamiller 17y ago
  A Twitter-integrated video site. Now displays HD.
  - alain94040 17y ago
    Do we need one railroad company per town? So now there would be a video site that is twitter-friendly (in HD), another one that is youtube friendly, another one that is voice-mail friendly... How many different video sites can we have?
- diego 17y ago
  My understanding is this: sometimes you want to tweet a link to a video. If the video is not already on Youtube, you have to upload it first. The last time that I did this, the following steps were required: - browse your file system for the video (starts uploading as soon as you select it) - while it uploads, fill in the title, description and tags. The title could be your status update, the other fields are not necessary if all you want is to tweet the video. - click submit and wait a few minutes (varies depending on their load) until your video becomes available for viewing - copy the url and compose a tweet including it It would be easy to create a mobile or web app to streamline this process using the Youtube API(e.g. type in your tweet, chose/record a video, submit and forget. We'll fill in the details and publish your tweet when the video is available). It's probably been done. Vidly looks like yet another video site, only it attempts to be Twitter-friendly by incorporating that feature from the start.
DarkShikari 17y ago
For a moment when I read the headline, I thought they were sending videos over Twitter by splitting them into 140-character data segments.
- chrysb 17y ago
  Let me know if you can figure that out and we'll implement the feature asap.
  - kierank 17y ago
    A transport stream (that is used in digital TV and Blu-Rays amongst other things) segments video/audio into 184 byte payloads. It's not that much different really.
axod 17y ago
If there's a sign of a bubble, it's companies building things that already exist, on top of companies that have no business model. Skeptical.
- chrysb 17y ago
  Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod.
  - tsally 17y ago
    Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod. Hi. Good to see the CEO of the company posting on this thread. Just in case you were not aware, Twitter launched before you were able to tag other people in your Facebook status. Tagging a person, however, is just one of many differences between Facebook status and Twitter. There are no hash tags, no lists, and no trending topics on Facebook. More importantly, on Twitter you can get direct access to the words of celebrities and other notable people. On Facebook typically all you would see would be an HR maintained fan page. There's a big difference between that and getting a direct line via Twitter. I'll give a concrete example. A couple of days ago I was able to ask Jason of 37signals whether he knew of a copy of his talk from Start Up School besides Justin.TV. He responded to me within an hour. Interaction like this is not possible via Facebook status updates. It seems to me that your claim that Twitter built something that already existed isn't true. As a side note, your tone seems a bit confrontational for what I would have expected from a YC CEO.
    - chrysb 17y ago
      I'm aware of why Twitter is successful despite Facebook. Although when it originally came out a lot of people didn't understand what the difference was. The example just points out that things can be similar and still pull away from the pack because of the small things they do differently. My tone, which obviously text does not convey, was playful and light-hearted. We all know you don't post news to YC to get fluffy love comments, you post it to get 100 reasons why you suck. We don't take it personally.
ak1394 17y ago
I don't know how popular a service like that is going to be. I'm doing something similar at the moment - a combination of Twitter client for j2me phones that beside normal twitter functions allows taking photos/videos/audio recordings and a web site to display recorded material. I've been live for about a month, and surprisingly I'm not seeing many users recording videos. Most would use it as a normal Twitter client, and some maybe will snap a few photos.
Tichy 17y ago
Very impressive. I didn't think it was possible to compress HD videos into 140 bytes.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Somebody dropped the ball here. Not only is this possible with a few clicks -- it's already possible with no clicks at all. It's an entire company devoted to replacing one feature that already works fine on an immensely popular site. Just set up AutoShare. When you upload a video, you get a tweet (and FB and others get notified as well if you've set it up to cascade) Where was the value again? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGsF0YR7NU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGsF0YR7NU (instructions on how to set this up on YouTube)

63 points by chrysb 17y ago

A suggestion for Vidly: please make a video's view count available through the API. I just went with YouTube + bit.ly for a video & twitter related thing I'm doing because I have to have access to the view count.

danielrhodes 17y ago
Thanks for the suggestion! It will be in the next push, later today.
- dilanj 17y ago
  Real-time feature releases, nice work Dan!
- jraines 17y ago
  Awesome - thanks!

DarkShikari 17y ago

Someone should tell them to upload their encoder; they're apparently about 4 years out of date, which would explain why their video quality is rather subpar for the claim of "HD". x264 - core 57 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2005 - http://www.videolan.or g/x264.html - options: cabac=0 ref=3 deblock=1:1:1 analyse=0x3:0x113 me=hex subm e=5 brdo=0 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=0 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone =21,11 chroma_qp_offset=0 threads=12 nr=0 decimate=0 mbaff=0 bframes=2 b_pyramid =0 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=3 wpredb=0 bime=0 keyint=60 keyint_min=25 scenecut= 40(pre) rc=abr bitrate=2000 ratetol=1.0 rceq='blurCplx^(1-qComp)' qcomp=0.60 qpm in=10 qpmax=51 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 pb_ratio=1.30 Even Youtube does a better job keeping modern than this; there's no excuse for startups to be using outdated technology.

alain94040 17y ago
I'm not an expert, but has H.264 encoding improved that much in 4 years? Usually, it's the standard itself which provides the quality (and H.264 is better than Mpeg-4).
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  As the lead developer, I can say quite confidently that the encoder matters a huge amount more than the standard. See: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/quality_chart1.png http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual... http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102 As you can see, a bad H.264 encoder (e.g. Apple's) can barely compete with Xvid. The entirety of my work on x264 is contained in the past 2 years of development. The psychovisual optimizations alone probably account for at least a 50-70% improvement in compression quality.
  - wensing 17y ago
    "As the lead developer..." Great example of why I love HN (and IRC).
chrysb 17y ago
Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it. We're always open to feedback and you should know that the YC nature is to be constructive and helpful in our community of startups and hackers. Thanks!
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  Your x264 encoding library is quite outdated (read: years). Newer versions are faster, more efficient, and give higher quality output. You can get the latest at http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary . If you need any assistance, drop by #x264 on Freenode. I'm always surprised by how video startups--whose most important technical resource is their video conversion system--don't seem to do sufficient research into how it actually works (or for that matter, how well it actually works). This may be because of the assumption expressed in posts like http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713: that all software is pretty much equal and it doesn't matter what you use or how you use it. Then again, I can't be too harsh, because you at least used open source tools instead of Flash Media Encoder, so you must be doing something right ;)

alain94040 17y ago

Can someone explain the rationale behind such a service? Twitter and HD video? I must be showing my age, but what is the point? I'm genuinely curious to understand what kind of company they are trying to build. Do they want to take down youtube? Someone please spell it out for me.

alaskamiller 17y ago
A Twitter-integrated video site. Now displays HD.
- alain94040 17y ago
  Do we need one railroad company per town? So now there would be a video site that is twitter-friendly (in HD), another one that is youtube friendly, another one that is voice-mail friendly... How many different video sites can we have?
diego 17y ago
My understanding is this: sometimes you want to tweet a link to a video. If the video is not already on Youtube, you have to upload it first. The last time that I did this, the following steps were required: - browse your file system for the video (starts uploading as soon as you select it) - while it uploads, fill in the title, description and tags. The title could be your status update, the other fields are not necessary if all you want is to tweet the video. - click submit and wait a few minutes (varies depending on their load) until your video becomes available for viewing - copy the url and compose a tweet including it It would be easy to create a mobile or web app to streamline this process using the Youtube API(e.g. type in your tweet, chose/record a video, submit and forget. We'll fill in the details and publish your tweet when the video is available). It's probably been done. Vidly looks like yet another video site, only it attempts to be Twitter-friendly by incorporating that feature from the start.

DarkShikari 17y ago

For a moment when I read the headline, I thought they were sending videos over Twitter by splitting them into 140-character data segments.

chrysb 17y ago
Let me know if you can figure that out and we'll implement the feature asap.
- kierank 17y ago
  A transport stream (that is used in digital TV and Blu-Rays amongst other things) segments video/audio into 184 byte payloads. It's not that much different really.

axod 17y ago

If there's a sign of a bubble, it's companies building things that already exist, on top of companies that have no business model. Skeptical.

chrysb 17y ago
Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod.
- tsally 17y ago
  Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod. Hi. Good to see the CEO of the company posting on this thread. Just in case you were not aware, Twitter launched before you were able to tag other people in your Facebook status. Tagging a person, however, is just one of many differences between Facebook status and Twitter. There are no hash tags, no lists, and no trending topics on Facebook. More importantly, on Twitter you can get direct access to the words of celebrities and other notable people. On Facebook typically all you would see would be an HR maintained fan page. There's a big difference between that and getting a direct line via Twitter. I'll give a concrete example. A couple of days ago I was able to ask Jason of 37signals whether he knew of a copy of his talk from Start Up School besides Justin.TV. He responded to me within an hour. Interaction like this is not possible via Facebook status updates. It seems to me that your claim that Twitter built something that already existed isn't true. As a side note, your tone seems a bit confrontational for what I would have expected from a YC CEO.
  - chrysb 17y ago
    I'm aware of why Twitter is successful despite Facebook. Although when it originally came out a lot of people didn't understand what the difference was. The example just points out that things can be similar and still pull away from the pack because of the small things they do differently. My tone, which obviously text does not convey, was playful and light-hearted. We all know you don't post news to YC to get fluffy love comments, you post it to get 100 reasons why you suck. We don't take it personally.

ak1394 17y ago

I don't know how popular a service like that is going to be. I'm doing something similar at the moment - a combination of Twitter client for j2me phones that beside normal twitter functions allows taking photos/videos/audio recordings and a web site to display recorded material. I've been live for about a month, and surprisingly I'm not seeing many users recording videos. Most would use it as a normal Twitter client, and some maybe will snap a few photos.

Tichy 17y ago

Very impressive. I didn't think it was possible to compress HD videos into 140 bytes.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Somebody dropped the ball here. Not only is this possible with a few clicks -- it's already possible with no clicks at all. It's an entire company devoted to replacing one feature that already works fine on an immensely popular site. Just set up AutoShare. When you upload a video, you get a tweet (and FB and others get notified as well if you've set it up to cascade) Where was the value again? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGsF0YR7NU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGsF0YR7NU (instructions on how to set this up on YouTube)