Fixing video sharing
I’ve only shared two videos on the website so far. But it was still bugging me that GitLab Pages does not support Safari’s requirement of byte-range requests, resulting in videos not being playable on iOS and Safari on macOS. So, I now host the files separately on webspace I’m paying for anyway (and which hosts The Photo Journal, too, for example).
This server supports byte-range requests, so the videos should now work for everyone.
I use the subdomain videos.danielpietzsch.com. This isn’t served via HTTPS (yet), but that’s alright for me. (UPDATE: Using insecure HTTP was then causing Google Chrome to not play the videos. This has been fixed by now serving videos via HTTPS.)
The workflow is now slightly different, as I no longer commit the video to the Git repository. Instead I first upload the video via FTP and then use its new URL. And I actually prefer not having to commit the file, to keep the repo size small, despite the fact that this was done via Git LFS (which might be something I should not worry about, but I don’t know). And this probably means slightly more maintenance and potential for errors in the future, as not everything’s in one place any longer. And I probably need to update and prune my Git history now to remove all references to those two files (although I’m not quite sure if I really need to or can in regards to Git LFS).