Hi there! This is a message from the samtripoli.com team!
As many of you have noticed, we recently did an overhaul of the comments section with neat things like colored usernames and badges for members, a rating system, comment threads, profiles, avatars, and more. This has been great for the site and has encouraged a lot more discussion in the comments section. Awesome! We’re trying to do more to bring the fans together and more changes will be coming really soon!
One thing that has become apparent as a result of users becoming more vocal is that there is a lot of (completely justified) negative feedback in the comments section, primarily surrounding the video streams not working. Some of the feedback has noted “I’m on full bars on 5g but it won’t load the video all the way.” and “They are always glitching and stopping.” or even gone as far as “this fucking website sucks balls” and “You should get a different website host.” 😭
Okay, this is our bad! We have a robust support system and have been ready to receive any reports to our support team about these issues, but have receive 0 messages on the issue so it’s clear that we have room to improve how we communicate with the members of this site and collect feedback because we were not aware of these complaints until the comments section became more active. We owe you all an explanation: Many of you have figured out already that these video streaming glitches only happen within the first few hours of the video being uploaded (some are longer than others depending on if they are 4K or not). This is because of a process called “transcoding” which all video sites have to deal with. What is transcoding?
Transcoding is the process of converting a file from one encoding format to another, typically to make it compatible with different devices or platforms. This involves decoding the original file, making adjustments (like changing the resolution or bitrate), and then re-encoding it into a new format, which is crucial for streaming services to deliver video to a wide range of users and devices.
In the context of our upload process, this primarily means that when a video is uploaded to the server, the video needs to be split up into different levels of quality so people can watch them at different bitrates (240p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, and 2160p if the video is 4K). When a video is uploaded to most video sites, the site will make the uploader and their viewers wait a period of time before the video is posted and viewable by users. With Sam’s site, we make the choice to make these videos available to users as soon as possible because we are prioritizing getting episodes up for people to watch as quickly as we can. When we upload a video, we get a message on the backend that looks like this:
While we get this notice letting us know that it “may not work properly” while this process is happening, we choose to release them anyway knowing that users can watch them while they are still transcoding if they want to see the content immediate or wait a bit if they want a more stable viewing experience. Of course, many users had no idea that we were making this choice for them and all they knew was that the videos were playing poorly and so their first instinct was to express their dissatisfaction in the comment section.
Hey, we hear you now and we’re sorry that you’ve been dealing with this. Going forward, we will now be doing the following:
- We will delay posting each episode until we can confirm that the transcoding process is complete. This will now be a manual process where the support team will have to check back periodically to see if it is finished, then release the video.
- We will be writing custom automation software to communicate between the video server and the website to detect when the transcoding process has completed and immediately release the video when that happens. This will take some time to build, but we will be working on it!
Thank you for the feedback. If you have any ideas, additional feedback, or questions on the matter, please share them in the comments on this post. Additionally, we are now building a new newsletter. Previously, Sam was collecting signups via Mailchimp and many people signed up for his newsletter, but that was handled by an external team and to our knowledge no emails had been delivered to The Swarm. Mailchimp deleted his newsletter for unknown reasons so we are starting a fresh newsletter system! Please sign up so we can send you Sam’s tour dates, recent episodes, updates, and more. We’re hoping to use this newsletter to connect better with members and do more to improve everyone’s experience on the site.
Finally, a big thank you to everyone in this community. We honestly love you guys and are incredibly thankful for everything you all do to support Sam and the show.
Always loyal to the foil,
– Ricky