Show HN: Instafilm -- it's like Instapaper for videos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Instafilm -- it's like Instapaper for videos

instafilm.com

87 pointsmahipal51 comments

I had this built to scratch my own itch: I would always find videos that I wanted to watch and bookmark them. And then I'd lose them in a sea of bookmarks. Whenever I wanted to watch something, it was hard to find something that fit how much time I had. So this solves both those problems.

I say "had this built" because it was my little experiment in management. The whole thing was put together by a team of 4 (including me) and now we've launched it without me writing a single line of code. Since I'm the guy who's usually coding nonstop to launch something, it was a refreshing change and a fun experiment.

Do you plan on writing a blog post about this? I'd be interested to read it.

Good to know. It was my first such experiment, and it does boil down to a few core principles I wanted to apply. I'll write something up once things calm down a little bit.

Awesome! We took a slightly different route and tried to build something similiar over a Startup Weekend.

Cool. I've discovered several other apps like this in the past week or two. Is yours still up?

Great idea, often have this problem also especially with more people linking video on twitter, Techcrunch TV etc. Will check it out but will it cache the video on my iPhone and allow me to watch it without an internet connection? I.e. what Instapaper does for me for reading.

I can see there being issues with this, but that is something I would love - so I could bundle up some videos to watch on my tube ride home.

My suggestion: An http://upl8.tv style interface for viewing.

I was just about to make something like this for myself. Thanks for making it! Looking forward to an iPad app.

One quick bit of feedback: I notice when I'm logged in and try to refresh my saved videos (say to refresh to see whether the video I just hit "Watch Later" would appear), the app logs me out. Everything else appears to work great - including leaving the page and coming back to it. Just when I hit refresh. When I log back in, the video appears in my queue like I'd expect it to.

It's probably on your radar, but being able to save TED Talk videos and Mixergy interviews would be great.

Thanks! Glad you like it. The iPad app is coming soon, but in the meantime the site should work on your iPad without a problem. Mixergy and TED will definitely be coming soon to the list of supported sites.

As for the error, you might've caught us while we were frantically rebooting. :) But I'll check it out.

I assume you already know about http://embed.ly but are concerned about security, like embedding unknown/untrusted html on your site?

I find your idea great and I have built something similar my self. I focused mostly on the interface and the fact that many times when watching a video you want to be able to switch between videos and make them fullscreen without interrupting their download. For example, when you have a long video on youtube that is split into many parts.

Playlists and ratings for videos is also quite useful in my opinion.

If you want some ideas check it out: http://lideo.me - you don't have to register/signup to start using it. You can do that later.

Consider adding a ``Login with Facebook'' button. While I personally hate the login everywhere with Facebook idea, it can be pretty useful.

Most of my friends are discouraged by having to create yet another account for a website they haven't found useful yet. It's a shame because so many services become useful when they have the social element---there would be no point to Facebook if none of your friends used it. I know that the login with Facebook option helped me coax a few people on to Convore to talk with me.

Also, consider making that picture of the time slider bigger and more friendly looking (centered!) It's an awesome feature that works really well with video. You could even advertise it something like ``Take a break! Watch [n] minutes of videos you've saved.''

I'm getting a few 502 Bad Gateway errors.

That's a very good point. I'm going to move fbConnect way up the list. Thanks for the tip.

I've been using Radbox ( http://radbox.me ) for a few months, much better, far more video sources, works on my Android phone, lets me create playlists. What's new?

I randomly got a nginx bad gateway error a couple times in a row. Don't know if you were resetting/restarting but just FYI might wanna tail your error log.

It works well, but I prefer the internal features, Youtube's Watch Later (and private playlists), and Vimeo's Watch Later. I think it will work better when there's more overlap between the sites it supports, or maybe it just doesn't support my habits. I'd love to come back in a month and look.

I'd be interested in an iphone app that plays the hd audio of youtube playlists, is this related enough to be a feature?

The HD audio stream is a cool idea. I've been using YouTube as my main source of music lately, so I'm willing to call it a related feature. ;)

What do you mean it doesn't support your habits? Can you describe your video-watching habits?

Clicking watch later on Gawker/etc to watch, searching and subscriptions to listen to (music remixes). Separate private playlists for each. Eventually I will work through the 20 20-90min videos I have bookmarked, but subject matters more than length.

edit: I do see a point in what you do, it's for medium immediacy. I watch quickly to keep up with trends/memes, and before copyright holders delete music.

That's a pretty interesting management experiment.

By the way, have you seen vhx.tv?

I like the how-much-time-do-you-have slider. But why would I use this over YouTube own "watch later"?

Thanks! I suggest you'd use this because it supports more sites than just YouTube (and, if you ask me, because the UI is better too ;).

Right now we only support Vimeo and YouTube, but we'll be adding more soon, once we find out what people want.

I too like the feature, but the language, "How much time do you have?", confused me until I actually had saved a few videos. Something along the lines of "Show me videos longer than.." would better reveal the feature's purpose.

I definitely struggled with that bit of copy. Thanks for the suggestion.

I use http://www.squrl.com/ for this

I've been wishing for something like this for a while.

...except that I'd need it to be able to queue up things that I can watch later on a mobile device, possibly while offline. That's what makes Instapaper awesome.

Thanks!

The site works on your mobile device since it uses HTML5 embeds. A native app is in the works.

Caching is more difficult since it violates the TOS for some web sites -- but not all. So I'll have to sort this out on a case-by-case basis, but it may be added at some point too.

Another similar website was just launched: VHX (http://vhx.tv). It's currently in a closed beta, but they're slowly sending out invites. I've been using it for a few weeks now and it seems really nice, allowing you to choose things to watch later in addition to cataloging every video you watch on the internet (it spans tons of sites, way more than just Vimeo and YouTube).

Fun fact: Former Vimeo developer Casey Pugh is one of the people behind the site.

This looks awesome. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to support HTML5 video for YouTube; it complains that I don't have Flash (which I don't).

The videos I've saved work for me when I browse Instafilm on my iPad. It may depend on your specific video - if I remember correctly, some YouTube videos are unable to support HTML5.

Not talking about an iPad; I used Firefox 4. I confirmed that the particular video supported WebM on YouTube. However, I just tried again with some other videos, and it worked this time. Perhaps YouTube just randomly decided that that video shouldn't work for a while. shrug

Awesome stuff. It's like my own personal, curated video channel!

In your slider bar for how much time you have, I would recommend having some dynamic text above the dot displaying how much time I have selected. It's a bit confusing trying to discern the exact number between the discreet quantities (e.g. between 5 and 10 minutes, is it 7 minutes or 8 minutes).

I didn't realise I had to scroll this up to see videos I had sent, and so I thought it was broken. From a usability point of view, starting the bar at the right hand side, showing everything, and scaling the list back when you slide left would be much better in terms of educating your users.

Also, Instapaper nailed it with the "Saving ..." > "Saved!" language in the book mark. If you are using the name, go the whole hog and copy that - the feedback to the user that it is safely stashed on the Insta~ servers is invaluable.

Good points on the UX. Thanks. I'll make sure that gets fixed.

My post was very negative. Apart from the above, minor, details, its a great service that I hope I can use as much as I do Instapaper.

(Be even better if it could work with embedded Youtube/Vimeo on other domains, like devour.com).

Glad to hear it. Feel free to email or post any more thoughts. Good critique is always valuable.

It will work with embedded videos very soon. We're tracking down some errors in a JS DOM parsing library that the web app uses.

This is actually a really good idea. I use Read It Later and saving videos I want to watch later just doesn't work.

Big problem: Copying the "Insta" prefix just isn't going to work (unless you're Instapaper). You're using their branding and marketing efforts to your advantage, so if your site happens to take off you'll be up against legal issues.

I don't see why he would. What about Instagram etc?

Hmmm fair point, also looks like Instapaper isn't registered as a trademark, 'Insta' is probably too generic, and paper is definitely too generic to trademark.

Perhaps I should stand corrected.

You can probably answer that question on quora with your new service http://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-there-an-Instapaper-or-ReadItL...

I've used http://rewindle.com/ in the past for this.

I've used http://wacchen.com/

I've used http://reeplay.it/ (and http://wacchen.com/ too)

I have used radbox.me earlier to bookmark videos and it works fine.

This isn't a new idea, but an implementation sticky enough for me to use has proven elusive. Instapaper-like offline caching may be important, or maybe integration with Reeder, various Twitter clients, etc.

I'd really like one that stores my queue on Pinboard.in (as unread links, tagged as 'video').

Thanks for the other feature ideas!

Now that we've launched I keep stumbling across more and more implementations. So far, I still like mine the best. ;)

Twitter integration is high on the list. Since there's so many things to do with Twitter, I'm prioritizing the easiest one: just being able to tweet out links to videos on Instafilm.

I like the pinboard.in idea. I'm interested to hear any other things you'd want out of a service like this, too.

Can you publish the Bookmarklet code as plain text somewhere? Please :)

I want to install it on my mobile safari, but I don't have a computer with a mouse nearby to copy that and send to myself via email :(

(in case someone doesn't know, the way people install bookmarklets on mobile safari is by copy/pasting the code into the URL field of an existing bookmark)

I have been working on a similar project for a while, but for lack of time it's going nowhere. I've been wanting this forever though. Great to see these guys took it seriously and shipped. Woohoo!

Excuse me while I go sign up and watch shit, now…

Similar: http://www.squrl.com/

But, do you say it's like instapaper for videos On your website.

http://wacchen.com says it right on the box.

Great idea. To me, it's useless without an iPhone/iPad app though, looking forward to that.

Great app. Very simple, with one focus. Elegant design too. Hope this takes off!

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