Officially announcing the end of my development on Vidify, with some last words about the project and what it meant to me.
Vidify was one of my first big software engineering projects, and I invested atremendous amount of effort into its development. Supportingmultipleplatforms, building anaudio synchronizationextension, communicating betweendevices throughDNS-SD,and releasing a website and Discord server were just some of the many taskswhich helped shape my growth as a software developer.
The most rewarding part, however, was collaborating so closely with the opensource community. I was able to influence the design of new libraries, such asTekore, and improve existing ones,likeRSpotify. Moreover, Vidifyreceived a ton of help from contributors, including translating it toChinese orDutch, addingnew videoplayers,uploading it toGentoo, or reporting and fixing allsort of issues. This experience is probably what led me to eventually love opensource work.
Unfortunately, I have been neglecting Vidify for some time because of somefundamental challenges, as I introduced inthisarticle. Our main dependency,youtube-dl, wastemporarily takendown,and Spotify rejected API access due toToSviolations, among other issues.Additionally, it has become harder for me to keep up with side projects; I amnow focusing on other aspects of life after recently relocating to a differentcountry to work for Lyft. While I believe Vidify could take off, it wouldrequire a completely different approach and much greater scale, which is notfeasible for me in the near term.
The last commit on the desktop application was merged on December 2021, butthere had already been no active development on it since the end of 2020. We’renow in 2023, and rather than keeping the status of the project uncertain, Iwould like to announce that I’m officially archiving all the repositoriesrelated to Vidify:
The repository for audio synchronization remains archived:
And I’m releasing some parts of the project that I had kept private so far, mostimportantly the Vidify TV application for Android:
The final two repositories are unfinished attempts at rewriting the desktopapplication to various languages. This is usually a terrible idea, but as Imentioned, Vidify was part of my learning process in this field, and I have noregrets :)
It has definitely taken me more time than necessary to do this, because itsaddens me to abandon a project I had been so passionate about. But I know thatthe beauty of open source development lies in its ability to benefit others evenafter its original creator has moved on. By archiving the project instead ofdeleting it, anyone can continue to learn from its software and my accompanyingarticles, or even take on its development independently.
If you have any questions or plan to fork Vidify, feel free to reach out to methrough the links in my personal website,nullderef.com.
Thanks to everyone who made this possible ❤️,
Mario