Hero video dumbness - Githubissues

flashadvocate commented 2 months ago

Some funkiness happening with the hero video embed (autoplayed video at the top of the site, NOT the intro video). Youtube has some parameters you can use to force certain behaviors, but for whatever reason the video ends up not actually autoplaying. Conversely, the video embed we did for the "fallen angels" page behaves flawlessly. It might be worth comparing the two to see if we can get them to behave the same.

Some theories I have about why this is an issue:

It "knows" there's a layer on top of the hero video, so it's trying to be nice to the user (dumb theory)
The video is streaming and isn't ready to play yet, so our trigger to play gets missed (more likely)

The end goal is to have the hero video autoplay frameless without sound and loop.

flashadvocate commented 2 months ago

One thing to notice - if you go to the fallen angels page, and then go back to the homepage, the hero video plays as normal. For whatever reason.

bashtech commented 2 months ago

This is likely related to YouTube protections that prevent view farming by hiding running videos on web pages.

Maybe we could rehost the video rather than relying on a YouTube embed?

flashadvocate commented 2 months ago

We get a lot of spider traffic. The nice part about getting YouTube to host it is that we don't end up eating the bandwidth. We could look at using our existing cache layer with CloudFlare, but Argo (and Stream) is a paid service and probably not really worth paying for if we already have a free option.

Since I know it works since it seems to in certain places, I'm not convinced we need to abandon YouTube just yet.

bashtech commented 2 months ago

Since I know it works since it seems to in certain places

Do you have an example?

The Fallen Angels page is a webm (https://clanaod.net/images/memoriam-v2.webm) so that isn't comparable.

flashadvocate commented 2 months ago

Oh whoops, I could have sworn that was being served from YouTube as well...

Best example I have is once you're on the site and you go somewhere else, and then return. Why it works upon return and not initially is the mystery I'd like to solve

bashtech commented 2 months ago

Cloudflare R2 might be an option to avoid hosting the video on the web server. Storage is free up to $10 GB/month, free egress and 10 million class B operations per month.

flashadvocate commented 2 months ago

I like that idea. I've asked Arch to take a look and see what he thinks

ClanAODDev / aod_site_v2

Hero video dumbness #72