DTube playback on Steemit.com

So for a while I have been interested in the @DTube project. I think is one of the better projects from steemit, probably better than steemit.com itself. I think the UX is superb and also the best test-case for IPFS at the moment since most of IPFS is very geeky and this allows regular users to tap into the potential of this technology.

Steemit.com has been the premier social network however just like most of the internet, video usually trumps text. The reason why you dont hear much of blogging yet you see many people starting video podcasts and shows all over the internet is because of this fact.

DTube could become it's own cryptocurrency but for the time being is one of the most popular assets on the steemit projects out there.

However one constant frustration from the DTube community is not being rewarded as the more mainstream competitor Youtube. If you are a content creator a youtube link will be automatically recognize by the app and render it's player inside your article, making it real easy to insert into your blog.

The issue here however is that DTube is not recognized, instead it uses a preview image that the user needs to upload in order to insert a link to the DTube site. Making it harder for the reader to just watch the video and then come back to the original article.

Fortunately steemit.com is sort of open source as the code can be found on it's Github page and you can review the code. Whenever this is the production code however, I am not sure, but surely addressing the issue here could put pressure on steemit.com team to take care of this.

So far I have identified a few files that handles youtube recognition, a method called YoutubePreview as well as file called Links.js. The whole file is really created only for the porpouse of recognizing Youtube URLs.

In it you find a search / replace function that scrap the youtube.com or youtu.be urls and once founded it parse it to extract the YoutubeID and other possible parameters.

A different file called YoutubePreview.jsx handles a lot of these parameters and calls the iframe to display the player in the article post.

You can find these files yourself and also take a look and even try to get the DTube source code in steemit.com and answer to my Issue #2815 of the condenser project.

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About me:
Steemian, crypto fan, like to listen to 90s hip hop, and loves to chat about Linux Python and Free software. Runs a local Tech club in sunny Cancun, and enjoys hopping on planes and landing somewhere else.