Fanvids: Time To Build Them A Home

[morgandawn]

There are over 4 million fanworks listed on AO3. But fanvids have gained little traction....and very little attention or support from AO3. Vids (like fan art) are lost in the fanworks crowd, stuck on the back shelf, and not easily filtered or located. Fans must upload their vids to increasingly hostile streaming sites and run a constant risk of DMCA strikes, takedown notices and channel deletions. In many ways, fanvids are still stuck in the same nomadic environment that fanfiction inhabited before AO3 was founded in 2009.

 

A few vidders are using AO3 to create a "home base" for their streaming vids. By embedding a fanvid on your AO3 page, you can keep all your comments and kudos even if your vid is yanked from Youtube or Vimeo or your account is wholesale deleted. You can hand out a single link to people (a link to the AO3 vid "home page") and you will only need to update the embedded vid if and when as needed. Currently here are some of the video hosting sites that are "whitelisted" for embedding on AO3

 
YouTube

Vimeo

Vidders.net

VidderTube

Internet Archive (yes you can upload your fanvids to the Internet Archive)
 

So...... as of Feb 2019, how many vids are on AO3?

               8,760 (plus or minus).* 

How many vidders have uploaded their fanvids?

              1514 (plus or minus)*

 
There are over 4 million fanworks on AO3.

Fanvids consist is .2% (.002).
 

What can we do to improve AO3 to make it a better home for vidders and their fanvids?

1. Let your favorite vidders know about AO3 and that they can create a stable home base for their vids (we have a tool...let's use it)

2. If you are a vidder, create a page for each of your vids (those who do not participate are often never counted)
 

3. If a streaming site that you use (or would like to use) is not supported on AO3, contact AO3 and put in a request (as more fans move to federated fandom sites running PeerTube and Hubzilla, will AO3 be able to speed up site whitelisting?  The Critical Commons website is no longer  functionally whitelisted because they have not turned on HTTPS. Is anyone from OTW working with them? Looking for workarounds?)
 

4. Push AO3 to offer more support for locating and showcasing vids on AO3. (ex: Make the Video tag canonical so we can set up feeds. Are there other improvements we can ask for?)
 

5. Push the OTW to revitalize the Vidding committee (This will require that vidders and/or fans of fanvids volunteer)

6. Other ideas?



*Thanks to Garfield for doing the hard work of locating and categorizing the fanvids currently on AO3 and where they are stored. He points out that some vid pages on AO3 may have vids embedded or hosted in multiple locations.

EDITED TO ADD AO3 SUGGESTIONS FROM BELOW

*Make the Video tag canonical so we can set up RSS feeds/notifications of new fanvids

*AO3 should add Video Element Embed Support: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/video

and related, Track Element Embed Support: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/track

and the podfics out there could probably also use the Audio Embed Support: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/audio  

Vidders and podficcers would be able to use different hosting providers, would be able to offer more accessibility options like subtitles, and would reduce the need for  site by site AO3 whitelisting.

Comments

[absolutedestiny]

If they added and element support the same way they support in works, we would be able to self-host while still having the vid embedded in the work and not just as a download link.

for subtitles can be tricky because of CORS but you can use a data-url. If they supported it, I'd be able to write a guide to html5 video captions for ao3 that people could use.

[morgandawn]

OK adding: AO3 should add Element Embed Support
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/embed

Support for Data URLs to allow subtitles?

[absolutedestiny]

No, the embed element is not what we need - that won't help us.

We need support for the video element: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/video

and related, the track element: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/track

and the podfics out there could probably also use the audio element: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/audio

If the ao3 work did not remove those tags we'd be able to do a great deal.

[morgandawn]

Got it (will edit the list above)

when you say: "If the ao3 work did not remove those tags we'd be able to do a great deal." are you meaning?

"If, when we create an AO3 fanwork, ao3 did not not strip/block these element tags, vidders and podficcers would be able to use different hosting providers, would be able to offer more accessibility options like subtitles, and ????????"

1. If these elements were added/allowed would this increase AO3 security?
2. Would we still need to whitelist each vid website that is hosting the vid (I am looking at the multitudes of federated fandom instances down the road)
3 I see HTML5 mentioned in places...how would that fit in

[absolutedestiny]

1. Increase? No. Well, it would reduce the need to use 'iframe' solutions, so that could technically be considered an increase in security perhaps. Decrease? I don't believe so.

2. Not for use in the HTML5 elements that I described, no, but I don't know if federated fandom instances have the ability to directly host the video and audio assets needed to use in the 'video' and 'audio' elements as I am not familiar enough with the technology.

3. HTML5 was a version of the HTML specification formalized in the late 2000s. These days, instead of versions it is a living specification. In the HTML5 specification, a number of new semantic elements were defined for use in html documents. The elements I described (video, audio and track) have available for use by web browsers since around 2010 and those elements are now currently supported by 92.62% of browsers used today: https://caniuse.com/#feat=video

(the support for captions is lower, at 87.9% https://caniuse.com/#feat=webvtt )

[morgandawn]

Re #2: Here is an example of a PeerTube instance where we're testing fanvids:
https://fanvid.stopthatimp.net/videos/watch/1820182d-5d4c-425e-81ac-91a301ec0d40

This instance relies on iframe embeds so it would need to be white-listed for AO3. My assumption is that if both AO3 and the video host supported the video/audio elements, no AO3 whitelisting would be needed?

iframe width="560" height="315" sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts" src="https://fanvid.stopthatimp.net/videos/embed/1820182d-5d4c-425e-81ac-91a301ec0d40" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe

[absolutedestiny]

Looks like you can get the source mp4 which you could use in a video element:

https://fanvid.stopthatimp.net/static/webseed/1820182d-5d4c-425e-81ac-91a301ec0d40-272.mp4

But I don't know how reliable that link is.

[morgandawn]

BTW, this is the reason AO3 originally gave on why they did not support video/audio tags

"We do not actively support:

or – These are new HTML5 tags, and while they’re great in concept, cross-browser implementation is currently spotty. One of the major problems is you need two different versions of the same file to be guaranteed to play in any browser. The Archive’s HTML Parser will remove any or tags."
http://www.transformativeworks.org/vidding-index/embedding-video-on-ao3/

There is no mention on the FAQ today
https://archiveofourown.org/faq/posting-and-editing?language_id=en#embedvideo

[absolutedestiny]

At the time, I'm sure that was the case. Some browsers only supported mp4, some only supported vorbis etc so you'd have to encode the video in different formats. You don't really have to anymore because basically all the browsers support mp4 now: https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4

In any case, I feel like this is more a problem for the people who want to post the content than an issue for ao3. I could put a format (like .webp) in an img tag that not all browsers support, but ao3 support the img tag and I can put any src I want in it, I think.