Coding Project: VOD Organization

4/17/2025 - Creativity

This may be perhaps the worst time of the year to start a new coding project, but it's okay because all I'm doing right now is the planning... I'll do the actual coding in the summer, I think. The story is, back in 2020-2021, there was a show that I enjoyed that was streamed online, where actors would each livestream their own perspective as they roleplayed in Minecraft-- as heroes, villains, and bystanders. There are hundreds and thousands of these multiple hour-long videos, and while they can be found in playlists, Youtube playlists are pretty inaccessible and non-descriptive for both new viewers and old rewatchers, especially when one event can have multiple characters displaying their unique perspectives. My hope is that with a website, there can be descriptions, categorization, and organization of these videos for people to more easily watch; I also want to just practice my computer science skills that I've learned throughout the past few years.

I started by gathering up a spreadsheet made by an organization in the viewerbase that organized every livestream in a strictly chronological order, using Regex techniques I acquired when doing cybersecurity to organize and reformat the data. I also made a Figma drawing board, planning out possible designs for the website, an application that I learned to use during my NASA Hunch project, while taking into consideration how I'd present the links to the videos on my website. Finally, I planned out some possible methods people would be able to organize these videos to watch them-- chronologically, as the spreadsheet had it; by the storyline, especially when there were sometimes multiple concurrent ones; or through the individual characters, so that people can see how a certain favorite develops their mindset throughout the progression of time.

Something I noted from my exploration of the spreadsheet was how online data can be so permanent but also impermanent at the same time. While most of the livestreams were accessible from Youtube, there were still a few that were only available on Archive.org. With copyrighting firms taking down videos from Youtube, decaying links, and large companies and hackers attacking Archive.org from both legal and digital methods, this content seems more fragile than ever; there is no guarantee that something might happen to the videos to make them permanently vanish from the internet. Yet at the same time, these videos are also the definition of stored memories. The roleplayers were genuinely having fun and making memories and sometimes even chatting with their viewers on livestream, and while those moments can't be lived through again, they can be recalled through these videos. I myself, rewatching some moments from the livestreams, find myself smiling with nostalgia.

LO6: The removal of free media and resources is a global issue. As reseach papers go behind paywalls, label companies copyright historical artifacts from Archive.org, and governments censor and remove news outlets, the public loses access to important information about the past (of humanity), present (situations across the world), and future (in research).