FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

How it all happened
The FIRST Tube project started the week after the build season ended after I posted a thread on CD asking if anybody would actually use it if it was there. Days later, the project set off with Forest Immel, Alex Kowald, and me, Pavan Dave, with a goal of making it possible for FIRST participants to share videos on a web site that is not blocked by school districts with a "ONLY ROBOTICS VIDEO" policy so schools have no reason to block it. The videos must be somehow related to Robotics, and you will see categories on the site where you can put your videos ranging from "Team Bonding" to "Regional Competitions".


Why Use it?
Because many students are complaining on CD because most of the time when they are on computers they are blocked from You Tube, and many teams rather than hosting on their own sites, refer to You Tube, so this way with FIRST Tube you can upload videos and be reassured that 99% of schools have not blocked it because they have never even heard of it.


Okay, okay, now where do I go to see this FIRST Tube?

You can go to FIRST Tube by typing in http://www.firsttube.org/ into your browser.

For any questions please feel free to contact me via Personal Message through CD or by using the Email feature through CD.

Please keep in mind FIRST Tube is in it's beta stage at moment and there is a bug that only enables us to view the first minute of your video so I apologize for that in advanced but we are working on it and you are not able to seek through videos. If you find any other bugs please feel free to let us know so that we can take the appropriate action.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

This is too awesome. I'm going to upload all our FIRSTcast material up there and use it from now on for videos!

THANK YOU FOR THIS AMAZING SERVACE!

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Keep in mind that there is a problem limiting us to 1 minute of material at the moment and we are currently trying to get that fixed, but you could upload them in parts if you would like. I apologize again for the problem and hope it doesn't cause too much inconvenience to the community.

Pavan.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Sweet!! This will definitely be very useful esp. once a lot of the videos get uploaded. Thanks to all of you who have worked on getting this up.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

That's cool. It'll be little preview segments for FIRSTcast. Still an awesome job though!

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Very good job guys! Ill be uploading anything i make there as soon as the 1 minute bug is fixed.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Looks good hopefully you can get it running to more than a minute.

Oh and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE change your logo, it is clearly in violation of the FIRST logo standards (which are available on the FIRST website, I would link to it but the FIRST website times out on this computer).

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

THIS IS AWESOME!!! I'll defiantly be uploading Team 1636's videos.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Here ya go!
http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...QuickStart.pdf
CAUTION!! PDF

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Hmm, very cool, huge potential!

I assume you are looking for some constructive criticism so here are some things I noticed while quickly looking over the site:

• No video image previews
• Timebar isn't working correctly, it jumps to full after about a second of playback
• The help page is blank
• As mich said, bad logo violation. If you want, I can play around with photoshop later and see what I can come up with...

After practically a failure of my FIRST resource, FIRSTr (due to lack of use), I sincerley hope that you can get a good userbase for your project. It is a nearly flawless youtube clone from what I have seen so far, and has massive potential.

Anyway, I'll keep playing with it and report back if I see anything else to bug you about. No matter what, great job so far!

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

So, I'm intrigued to what you are using for the backend FLV conversion on this. The Blue Alliance recently acquired a dedicated server from Host Rocket.com. I'm not the go to guy on this, but I believe we will be using FFmpeg (it installs on Linux, yea) along with a bunch of scripts to automatically take the uploaded file, convert it to FLV, and populate the database with it.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

THATS AWSOME!!!! ill try to find some 1086 videos to post...

~Alex~

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Great site, but does need a lot of work. Despite that, I hope to see this come to be widely accepted by the FIRST/CD community. 'twould be a great help to those of us stuck behind district-wide filters. :)

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Thank you everyone. We are currently still working very hard on the site. This is NOT the final version of FIRST Tube, it is only the beta version and it still needs some major changes made. We wanted to test some stuff and wanted some videos uploaded and comments so we could make the final version much much better.

Thanks,
Pavan.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Best Idea ever came up with, great place to centralize First Media, and FIRST Related Media, thank you so so much for this service.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Great Idea Pavan. Just one thing though...Will there be blocks on it so that people can't post videos not pertaining to robotics? Because if not, I gaurantee someone will put one on there. Just my thoughts, but awesome idea, I'm going!

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

This is an incredible idea.

Period.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Yes sir! I am hoping that for the most part, people will flag videos inapporpriate (You see a link to report at the bottom of the video page) but once we get enough people I will ask some CD mods or some active FT people to help moderate and delete videos.

Pavan.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

yes were using ffmpeg (very hard to get to run on a 1and1 Linux package. one of the reasons for the lack of thumbnails is that we cannot (as of yet) get the php-ffmpeg extension to work properly. that may also be causing the 1 minute time limit.

If anyone has experience using ffmpeg and or has a server location that we can get access to install ffmpeg to that would be great (as i said the files can be hosted at different locations so it will not be a huge amount of bandwidth, basically all initial uploads and then sending the files to a different server)

also how much is your dedicated server? im seeing if i can find a server that will do the converting and then upload the files to other servers as more space is required.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Awesome Idea!

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

VERY cool concept! I can't wait to see it when it's fully developed! You can be NYC/NJ FIRST will link to it for a helpful resource in the future!

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

I've been playing with the different upload formats. mpg and avi are working, except for the St. Louis videos on SOAP these are made with DIVX, you might want to try to update your video codecs on the server. Do you have a way of viewing which codecs you support ?

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

This is really sweet. Cant wait till its fully running. :D

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

So far, yes I know it's still being worked on, but are there still only 3 videos?:confused:

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

(happy b-day, btw)
well, the first time i heard about it was now. and i assume most FIRSTers weren't told till this afternoon. it'll be booming in a few weeks.

this is crazy awesome.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Very cool, I just added it to my favorites! I will defiantly use this.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

So I just tried accessing FIRSTtube from school, and received the following message:
:(

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

This just means that your school's internet policy only allows categorized websites and from there on it filters it, I guess. FIRSTTube just needs to categorize their website as "robotics" or something like that. If it can be done, I don't know anything about this stuff. Just reasoned assumption.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

Thank you very much. I will see that this problem gets taken care of soon. If anybody else has problems like these please let me know. Also if this site is blocked at your school send me a personal message and I will send you an email to send to your administers to get it unbanned. If you read our ToS, we are school friendly. :)

Thanks guys, without you guys we wouldn't be here!

Pavan.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

This is what we've been waiting for all along!! :)

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

:D Wow!!! Nice job!!! People should start sending theirs vids straight to there instead of YouTube, right now!
I have a very good feeling that this site will become the #1 clip uploading website for FIRST very soon.
Good idea Pavan!

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

I have some very funny videos from build season I'm going to put under "Team Bondin'" as soon as I get them off the team server...:D

This is a great project, I can't wait to see how it develops.

Re: FIRSTTube! - Are you tube enough?
 

During the course of this next week, there will be a server change and FIRST Tube may be down for a little while. Also if people could report all of the bugs to me by posting here or emailing me or sending me a personal message I would really appreciate it because we are here to serve you guys, and if you guys have a problem, so do we and we will try our best to fix it as soon as possible.

Thanks again,
Pavan.