Star Trek Update (Patreon)

I thought I'd take the opportunity to fill you in on how the Trek restoration process is going, since that franchise is tied so centrally to what I do.

I spent a fair amount of January working on uploads. I've been trying a variety of hosting options for it, and each one requires me to add additional code to accommodate a different player, so that's a joy.

Anyway, for the time being, I've been taking a twofold approach to them. The primary site has worked out to be DailyMotion for now. It has a number of downsides, not least being a maximum of 10 videos a day which is usually and inexplicably reduced to only 7 at times. They still bend to CBS though, and as a result, I've had 8 takedowns in the past few hours alone.

The backup site is BitChute. Its  primary downside is that there is no native fullscreen option in their player when it is embedded. It also has a rather iffy video conversion process, no means to edit some video aspects (such as the thumbnail), and there is no hiding a video that doesn't also prevent it from being embedded (meaning its location is publicly available, and also means I get the occasional bit of input from the Alt-Right). Also, improved features require payment, which I could make except I don't have any cryptocurrency.

I've tried every other site that has been suggested, but there's been problems:

-only accessible by viewers through payment

-no means for me to actually upload videos

-videos are accompanied by malware

-videos have horrible bandwidth

-are simple for bots to shut down

So DM and BC are the best out of a pile of bad options, so I've been working on them. So far I have everything from December 2016 to the present, plus the films and most of the first season of Voyager. However, most if not all of the TOS has been taken down, and my suspicion is that it's because of Shatner's song in the title sequence. I'm considering replacing it with my new universal title sequence and seeing if that corrects the problem.

I'm going to be working on this over the course of February, at the very least as a slapped together solution in case a better one can come along at a later date. 

I had previously mentioned giving Patrons full access. The plan was to link you to all the videos on Vimeo (they're still all technically there, but since they're hidden and no one can see them they can't be attacked). With the relentless search they have been doing though, I can't take the risk of CBS' bots discovering it and shutting down my entire catalog. So I'm sorry about that. Hopefully a better solution will come along, but hey, at least we have a solution of some kind.