Hey friends! I want to get better at letting you all know what we've been up to. I've been erratic with sending out these updates so now I'm working on being more consistent with these.
We've even gotten questions like "are you still building Video Tap?"
The answer is "absolutely! we're shipping more features and bug fixes than ever!"
Here's everything we shipped for Video Tap in October:
Dashboard refresh and simpler adding videos UI
We've been constantly upgrading and simplifying our design. There has traditionally been a lot of colors and it's been inconsistent. We've cleaned up a lot of things and hope you like it!
We also saw that users have been frustrated by our adding videos experience. It sometimes took 8+ clicks to add a video! We've simplified that to ~3 clicks and it all happens directly on your dashboard.
Faster processing
We've worked on streamlining how we process and encode videos. We've been able to speed up processing by 50%+. Before, we were creating separate video files for each clip. This is what took up most of the time for processing.
Now, we are able to use the full video file and only stream the sections that are needed to show each clip.
This also means that when you update the text in each clip, we can re-render it instantly.
And this also opens up a lot of future updates for us that we've been wanting to make including:
AI zooming/panning/tracking
Adding multiple sections of a video in 1 clip (highlight reel 🤩)
Adding a buffer to the beginning/end of a clip so the length of the clip isn't just tied to the words
Higher resolution clips
We've increased clip exports to 1080p. Sometimes they were exporting at lower resolutions like 400p. Now Instagram and Facebook shouldn't complain when you upload these clips to those sites.
Refreshed clips editor + more caption styles
In addition to the dashboard design refresh, we refreshed the clip editor design. We've also added more caption styles for you to choose from.
Fixed uploads
One of the hardest things about building Video Tap is... handling video files. Go figure! We wanted to build an AI company and now we know more about video handling than any person ever should.
We had an issue where uploads would hang at 99% and then never finish. We fixed this at the beginning of the month and have seen a big improvement in uploads.
Fixing YouTube (in progress)
As you may have noticed, we have been struggling to download YouTube videos. Google has been working to ban downloading YouTube videos. This is a problem because this is exactly what we do when you add your YouTube videos.
Why has Google blocked downloads? AI is all the rage these days and Nvidia has been downloading years worth of video from YouTube to train their AI. Because of this, Google has blocked YouTube downloads.
If you try the top 5 "youtube downloaders", all of them do not work anymore. We are doing our best to work around this, but it is a constant cat and mouse. We will find a solution and Google will find a way to block it.
I think we have YouTube working right now with a complex and expensive solution, but we want you to be able to grab your own YouTube videos!
Let us know if you have trouble with YouTube. And remember: the most guaranteed way for your videos to work on Video Tap is to upload your videos directly to us.
Translations
Fixed bugs and updated the design here.
Subtitles
Editing VTT or SRT is synced. This makes editing much simpler since you only have to edit one!
What's next?
For our next updates, we testing the new OpenAI o1-mini model for writing blog posts. Our early tests are promising!
We are also adding "Publish to YouTube". We would love for your workflow to be:
1. Upload to Video Tap
2. Publish to YouTube with all content like title, description, chapters, subtitles, etc