UriahShaulMandel/BaldPhone

Add tutorial videos from local files / folders?

Opened this issue · 1 comments

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The tutorial videos are somehow by principle the best idea, but completely useless for two reasons: a) they're not translated (and they're also not easily translateable because they are not script generated), and b) they are integrated as embedded video streams, making it horrible to use if you have bad connection or little battery left.
Still, they're just there, and confuse users who do not aspect Hebrew content without warning.

Describe the solution you'd like

In ascending order of usefulness but also work:

  1. Add a configuration to hide the videos alltogether.
  2. Make them replaceable by configuration with a folder. We already have a way to watch local video files inside the app (so both widgets + permissions are already there) - allow users to configure a folder on the storage to pull video files from instead. If the file names are URL encoded labels, this could work pretty well and would stay compliant with Windows File Explorer. I could also use file sync solutions like Dropbox or others to synchronize those videos to my grandparents after handmaking them. Additionally this works pretty synergistic with the built-in Android screen recorder feature - I can not only show my grandparents how to use their phone to do something, I can also record myself and put it into their launcher, easy to reach. And they can share videos via messenger if they want to.
  3. Replace the videos with autogenerated files. We could use CI/CD builds with emulators + screen cap (so even the shown UI is localized), and use TTS to generate the audio from a list of subtitle files. It can be run every major update. This obviously generates a giant batch of data (every video with every language), but it's not that much, especially when still uploading to youtube.

I strongly prefer the second option - it follows the Unix way of allowing us to use other apps to pull the files from, and is a nice way to add heavily customized videos, specific to one single user. It's also not that much work. By default you can still the original YT videos that are pretty well-made (just very useless in most countries).

As for video streams / YouTube in general: I recommend making them downloadable video files instead - that way the app size stays the same compared to embedding them within the APK, but someone could just download the video files in case of need (this is obviously not the main issue, but I was thinking about it when scribbling solutions).

Additional context
Issue #925 is definitely similar to the first solutions.

Is there interest in the second option?
If so, I'd like to look into it.