DevTube: Searchable index of developer videos
dev.tube
dev.tube
This is a brilliant idea, I'm going to file my patent application now.
This is the perfect combination of ebook and video for me, and I didn't know Manning was doing this. Some minor feedback:
- I wish the transcript text size could be increased without affecting the rest of the UI (which seems fine). Maybe it can and I missed it, or I need to be logged in?
- I see “pause on try its” in the page options (it's checked and disabled) but couldn't find any videos that use this. This feature sounds like it would greatly enhance the learning experience and it should be part of all videos. I learn a lot more when actively trying things than when passively watching and reading, and few online courses combine video and text transcripts with hands-on opportunities well.
I just bought Algorithms in Motion on the back of this experience, though, (plus a couple of books I'd been considering) and am looking forward to going through the whole course.
> - I wish the transcript text size could be increased without affecting the rest of the UI (which seems fine). Maybe it can and I missed it, or I need to be logged in?
Totally agreed we need this. I've passed this feedback onto the developers (I'm in editorial here).
> - I see “pause on try its” in the page options (it's checked and disabled) but couldn't find any videos that use this. This feature sounds like it would greatly enhance the learning experience and it should be part of all videos. I learn a lot more when actively trying things than when passively watching and reading, and few online courses combine video and text transcripts with hands-on opportunities well.
Yep, we're still experimenting with this feature. I think you'll see us using it much, much more in future content.
As a customer, I've been seeing the changes they've been doing over the years, and absolutely love the work they've done. At every stage, you can see the attention and care to simple things that make the Manning site a pleasure and the experience better and better. Tell them to keep up the good work.
It's in-house, yes. Interestingly, the original code base was designed to tie book text to audio-book readings, which we use in our liveBook platform. There's various third-party libraries in play for some of it, but other than that we've built it all in-house.
I agree that people can read at 200+ wpm while most people only talk at ~100 wpm. However, some programming presentations are visually intensive with demonstrations of interactive features. That would be videos such as showing how an IDE works (debugging tips and tricks), CSS transforms, GUI workflow (e.g. navigate AWS admin screens to set up security, auto-scaling, etc). For example, I see that the landing page has severgal Google I/O keynotes and those are always heavy with demos.
But yes, for presentations of static text such as explaining the new syntax for C++11, a "talking head" reading the slides may not add much value and just slow you down.
As for transcripts... Since many videos seem to come from YouTube, it may be possible to download the auto-generated captions.[1] (I don't have a YouTube account so I have no idea how well this works.) I noticed one presentation where a speaker was talking about "Qt" framework but the Youtube's speech recognition auto-captioned it as "cute". I don't know if mistranslation is a rare and minor annoyance or if it makes the transcripts unusable.
To downvoters: please let me know what I wrote that didn't add positive contribution to this discussion.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=download+youtube+captions&oq...
I wouldn't bother with the automatically generated ones, though. They are not good enough. (Whenever there are real captions, I turn them on to be able to speed up the video beyond the point where I can no longer hear what people say. That's great!)
How can you tell if the captions are real vs auto-generated? Do you mean "real" as in subtitles that are burned into the video source instead of being dynamically overlaid?
Ok, I never noticed that. I just read the captions and assumed obvious misspellings were auto-generated.
For example in this video[1], the caption text is "L1D cache misses" but he's actually saying "L1-dcache misses". (The Linux terminal screen he's showing does display "L1-dcache".) Even though that video is not labeled as "auto-generated", I assumed it was because of the bad caption. Based on your info, I guess CppCon uses humans like Mechanical Turk or other non-domain typists to manually add the captions.
In college, I met a deaf guy who always had two women accompany him to lectures; one of them would repeat everything into a mouth-covering microphone to generate an automatic transcription and the other went over it to correct obvious errors. They generated a lot of nonsense, especially when the German professor was using some English loanwords for CS concepts. I was always amazed that the deaf guy still somehow managed to learn something from these garbled transcriptions.
Yes, I get the point that many books have gratuitous screen shots to pad the page count. But that's a separate issue from the idea that some videos don't translate well to transcripts.
>had text descriptions for every element, you just need to read them.
Sure, I understand the value of reading. However, sometimes a presenter showing a live demo will wiggle the mouse cursor around certain options on the screen to emphasize particular things or clarify what may be confusing with a list of check boxes. ("You want to click this; you don't want to click that.") Or maybe demonstrate clicking on a setting and then immediately show the system dashboard statistics changing in realtime as a response. That combination of dynamic "spatial"+"time" to convey technical information is the value of live demos over reading man pages.
The videos are not replacements for concise reference texts but a supplementary teaching tool.
Here's an example of a video demonstrating high interaction with tools that would be very cumbersome to put into text:
https://youtu.be/Wuy_Pm3KaV8?t=20m00s
Lots of of mouse of movement to guide where the eye should look. Lots of scrolling and zooming. Voice annotation that's synchronized with the screen data that's constantly changing. It wouldn't translate well to text. Even if one manually created an accurate text transcript of that talk, all the missing visual cues would inhibit learning how to "drive" the tool like a car. Transcripts are only a reasonable substitute for some types of tech talks.
– Eduards
The mind just beees to get used to the voice and pitch of the speaker
I might be playing through a video really fast, but suddenly need to repeat something so hit backspace to drop to normal speed, a press or two of left arrow to jump back (~5 secs each), then tap ] a few times to speed up again. Then if there's an interesting chart or graph shown, just f to toggle full screen, s for screenshot if you like.
Being able to navigate and control linear media with simple keyboard shortcuts feels liberating in a similar way to the first time you grok a powerful edit with just a few keystrokes in Vim or Emacs (except you're just consuming media of course).
Instead, why not scrape all the videos (those with the right licenses of course) and put them on PeerTube? https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
There are constant discussions in the tech community about how we keep the internet free and usable by all. We (developers) should be leading by example and creating services that don't rely on permission from large corporations to operate. Especially when those services are about distributing knowledge.
Claim 1: Google will shut down video aggregation and hosting sites
Counterclaim 1: But what about x, y and z that exist parallel to Youtube?
Claim 2: Those are allowed to exist by Google.
I dont disagree with your overarching point, it just seem like your arguing it in a flawed manner without any real evidence of your claim occurring or explaining why there are other sites that provide similar functionality without being affected by Google?
>We (developers) should be leading by example and creating services that don't rely on permission from large corporations to operate.
Great so that is what the original poster is doing? And your already claiming that Google is going to shut this down. Seems kinda alarmist.
YouTube specific examples are hard to come by, but here's something related to how they control their API from wikipedia: "YouTube also does not allow videos to run whilst the Android device is sleeping. This can be seen as an annoyance for some users. Particularly if the user is trying to use YouTube as a replacement music player.[13]"
When you look at the reference for that quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGoVol6ujHk You get "This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated."
Presumably that original use case was outside of their terms, but why? It's not to help users, it's because it infringes on Google Music and their Ad Partners will not be happy if people are listening to ads instead of watching them. If google could get away with monitoring your phone to check you're watching the ads they put up, I'm sure they would because they could charge 3x the price for them.
If we look at other similar companies that have offered APIs for developers to use in the past we actually do find lots of examples of services that already existing being shut down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Developers https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/instagram-api-limit/ https://www.cnet.com/news/instagram-dont-use-insta-gram-or-i... https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/17/just-instagram/
So yes, these apps are only allowed to exist while Google allows it, if there's a squeeze at google they will get shut down. There is no reason not to use different tech given the options we have available today if we want to protect content and respect our users.
Most of the videos are uploaded by conferences and they hold the rights.
– Ed
Added to the dev plan. Expect to be ready within few weeks!
– @eduardsi
Note: I actually had to type the space after 'C' in the first search string, otherwise the results seemed to be things that contain the letter 'c'.
Thanks for raising this. We're still learning how Algolia search works :)
Investigating the issue, fix is coming soon.
– Eduards
* Is there an option to sort the videos based on date? Or filters? I don't really want to see older video from 2014, as some are really outdated videos.
* The title of video is really hard to read, when it's white text (all upper-case) on light blue background. I really really had hard time distinguishing one video from another. Also fonts used on the titles are the similar to meta-data, so it's really hard to find the title of each video.
* Is there a special reason why thumbnails dithered? It makes it hard to see them. If you don't want it to stand out, perhaps lower the saturation,... but dithered thumbnails are really an eye-sore.
* As someone had mentioned, having a "watch" button is a really poor choice, especially on mobile device, where button is really tiny and hard to press.
* Language tag should be disabled, until it has been fixed or made accurate. I see hundreds of videos, yet only few are actually tagged as English.
* The dimension of playing video is small; in fact, it's as big as the size of the thumbnails of related videos. Please make the video bigger.
Thanks for amazing feedback. Will be implemented within a few weeks.
Thanks again.
– @eduardsi
Thanks for reporting this. Will tune up search results a bit within the next few hours.
– Eduards
(no affiliation other than that I love it)
I don't know of any others, this one's covered my needs pretty well :sweat_smile:
https://awesometalks.party is great if you want talks about web-related topics, but there isn't much else (eg there are no talks on C++ or Java, or modern game development, or big data, etc there..). There's definitely room for another dev talks website that covers more subjects.
Maybe what they've done is legal in Latvia, I dont know.
Edit (I may stand corrected) per: 5.E.iii in https://www.youtube.com/t/terms listed in another thread. Disclaimer: IANAL
An example would be: <10 minutes <20 minutes <30 minutes
Youtube does not have this feature rather they only have short (<4 minutes) and long (>20 minutes)
If you're going through the trouble of developing a JavaScript-enabled interface, is it really that hard to work with the History API to provide friendly URLs?
Thanks for raising this. Many links are shareable and history-API friendly – e.g. direct video links, speaker links. (e.g. dev.tube/@eduardsi). Internal site-search is not History API friendly, though.
Any hints which parts of the product need better history support? Submit issue/feature request here:
https://github.com/watch-devtube/web
Thanks!
– Eduards
First of all thanks for your effort.
Search and filtering via tags is very important to be URL friendly, because people like me can then add it as a "search engine" via a keyword in Firefox or Chrome.
It's also the thing that bothers me about Pocket (getpocket.com), the fact that I can't add it as a search provider.
Thanks a lot for your idea. Will implement "hard links" for tags within the next few weeks.
– @eduardsi
Then I've watched it, and it turned out to be a 90 sec report from one of our public broadcastors about a conference outside my country.
Looking at the channel contribution guidelines[0], this really doesn't belong here.
[0] https://github.com/watch-devtube/contrib#channel-contributio...
Working on it. Improvements are coming soon.
Thanks!
– @eduardsi
Comments will be added soon.
Thanks for raising this! – @eduardsi
Edit: It seems to be allowed here. Section 4 E ii, note the double negative in 4 E:
4. General Use of the Service—Permissions and Restrictions
E. Prohibited commercial uses do not include:
* showing YouTube videos through the Embeddable Player on an ad-enabled blog or website, subject to the advertising restrictions set forth above in Section 4.D
https://pasteboard.co/HrwiibV.png
So it looks like depending when you live, it may or may not be against the terms & conditions.
Would be nice to see the whole list.
thanks in advance!
It's cross-discipline dev related. Vimeo support is coming soon. If you have a good game dev YouTube channel to contribute – that would be great! https://github.com/watch-devtube/contrib
This is a gem.
A bit annoying that the video automatically pauses when the tab looses focus.
Is it the speaker? She's charming and all... but 750k views? I wonder if that's because masses of developers are not happy with object oriented approaches in JS (count me in that crowd) and looking for a better way.
Thanks for raising this! – @eduardsi
Thanks for raising this. Feel free to contribute any missing channel: https://github.com/watch-devtube/contrib
Or just send me the channel links over Twitter (@eduardsi)
It's now possible to filter videos by date.
Enjoy!
– @eduardsi
youtube is in decline but it's not happening soon, some videos will disappear from youtube and we still need to save them somehow.
I have no doubt that unless this changes, a new competitor that can get enough network effect can eat youtube's lunch...
https://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/google-vid...