2024-07-30, 03:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 2024-07-30, 03:43 PM by joshuaboniface. Edited 1 time in total.)
This is something we have considered and rejected. Venson and Fate give the main reasons, but to sum up:
1. Videos take an extremely large amount of time to produce. As someone trying to make a video series for my own (non-Jellyfin) FLOSS project, I know. You have to research what you're talking about, write a script, record it (often many takes), edit it, respond to questions in comments (yet another fracturing of our information base which is something the Forum was designed to prevent), etc. This is "single person dedicated 'full-time'"-type work, all unpaid because of our philosophy. And it's not something that anyone on the team thus far has been interested or is knowledgeable in. This alone sinks the idea, but...
2. Jellyfin is a very fast moving project, even more so with our current plans to increase the major release cadence. Information presented in videos now would potentially be obsolete in another 3-6 months, which leads to...
3. Videos cannot be easily updated like written documentation can. It is not a trivial task to take an existing video and change parts of it to reflect the new reality after changes; this requires a lot of work to re-record new sections, re-edit and re-upload the video, etc. In contrast written documentation can be updated and immediately become the visible, live documentation immediately and with minimal effort. Sure, new videos could be recorded, but that's a huge amount of work (see #1) to repeat over and over again.
4. Videos are terrible for documentation. I know some people love them, but to be frank, they're a waste of time. Either the video is short and super-concise (good) and gets suppressed by the algorithm, or it's a long, redundant mess for "engagement" that wastes tons of time getting to the point and is worse in every way than written documentation. Further, video documentation can only cover an extremely narrow area in one video, necessitating an explosion in the number of videos required to cover every possible answer.
So, for documentation the answer is a hard "no".
Now, all that said, would something like "a video version of a major release blog post", highlighting the big features, be cool? Sure. But it's already a lot of work and struggle to even write textual blog posts, never mind all the extra work for a video. I just really don't see it happening, at least officially from us, any time soon.
1. Videos take an extremely large amount of time to produce. As someone trying to make a video series for my own (non-Jellyfin) FLOSS project, I know. You have to research what you're talking about, write a script, record it (often many takes), edit it, respond to questions in comments (yet another fracturing of our information base which is something the Forum was designed to prevent), etc. This is "single person dedicated 'full-time'"-type work, all unpaid because of our philosophy. And it's not something that anyone on the team thus far has been interested or is knowledgeable in. This alone sinks the idea, but...
2. Jellyfin is a very fast moving project, even more so with our current plans to increase the major release cadence. Information presented in videos now would potentially be obsolete in another 3-6 months, which leads to...
3. Videos cannot be easily updated like written documentation can. It is not a trivial task to take an existing video and change parts of it to reflect the new reality after changes; this requires a lot of work to re-record new sections, re-edit and re-upload the video, etc. In contrast written documentation can be updated and immediately become the visible, live documentation immediately and with minimal effort. Sure, new videos could be recorded, but that's a huge amount of work (see #1) to repeat over and over again.
4. Videos are terrible for documentation. I know some people love them, but to be frank, they're a waste of time. Either the video is short and super-concise (good) and gets suppressed by the algorithm, or it's a long, redundant mess for "engagement" that wastes tons of time getting to the point and is worse in every way than written documentation. Further, video documentation can only cover an extremely narrow area in one video, necessitating an explosion in the number of videos required to cover every possible answer.
So, for documentation the answer is a hard "no".
Now, all that said, would something like "a video version of a major release blog post", highlighting the big features, be cool? Sure. But it's already a lot of work and struggle to even write textual blog posts, never mind all the extra work for a video. I just really don't see it happening, at least officially from us, any time soon.
