iSnark was asking me to help him figure out how to add things to the video player. This video player runs in our full chat when we are doing movie nights. But I've realized there is maybe a lot of other information that could be useful too, for him. So I'm going to make a complete top to bottom guide. After reading this you'll be a pro at adding media.

Otherwise though it is pretty self explanatory.

The first thing to know is that any chat message starting with a slash "/" is really a command. One of the most useful commands is the /help command. It tells you what commands exist. You can also ask for help with a specific command. For example: "/help add" will tell you how to use the /add command.

Another useful thing to know about is common notation when reading about commands. I think 70% of people already know this but a few may not and it could cause some confusion. It's very common notation when showing what parameters go into a command to wrap mandatory parameters in curly braces "{param1}" and optional parameters in square brackets, "[optional]". For example "/help add" will tell use that the usage pattern for /add is "/add {url} [title]". This doesn't mean we type the brackets. It just signifies what is mandatory and what is optional.

There are other commands present like /skip /back /remove /seek. /play opens the player even if we aren't doing a movie night. /close closes the player. Some of these require the user to be badged to use them. Any badge will do. This ensures that there is some level of trust to prevent people from messing with an actively playing movie. If anyone needs a badge and doesn't have one yet I can give you one. You can see in your settings if you have any badges. I hand out badges like candy so chances are someone has a badge in the room.

The next thing to know is what media sources work. For sure any direct media url works. That is a url to an actual video file. This is the safest bet. But expanded from there many other urls work too. Basically it's anything where the linux command 'yt-dlp -j' can return meta data that gives me a direct media url. I know off the top of my head that Gvid works, so does Bitchute, X, and catbox. But not youtube or invidious. Rumble may work some of the time because they return different things to the meta data depending on the video. When in doubt just re-upload to gvid.

If using something else you can test the url by adding it after https://c4.gvid.tv/sneed/{url}.

Where to get movies from if you want to do this well?

If you want high quality, torrenting is where you are going to find 1080p. Bitchute can work if you are OK with 720p. But to get the best quality torrent it and reupload to any of the working hosts. To find torrents you can search the pirate bay. If you need a torrent application you can use qBittorrent. It can be helpful to use a VPN while torrenting which you can use one of the best ones, Mullvad. It is not mandatory to use crypto when purchasing a month of Mullvad but it is recommended. If you need a wallet you can use Exodus wallet, and you can fund it using Kraken. When torrenting it is helpful to make sure to get one with with the right codec and container. An MP4 file with a 264 encoding and AAC audio will work on all browsers out of the box. Otherwise you may need to re-encode it with FFmpeg. ChatGPT can help you figure out what commands can efficiently map a file with one codec to another.

But in the end you can obtain and host media urls any way you want. The key thing to know is the difference between a media url and a web page that serves html. If it is a url that serves html it will only work about one thrid of the time depending on if yt-dlp can work with it and how yt-dlp works with it.

Once you know the difference between a media url and a web page serving html it is a fairly easy tool to use.