Help / Uploading & the watch loop

Uploading & the watch loop

Publish a video and understand how the player treats it.

Requirements

Playback accepts MP4 or WebM up to 90 MB in this build. Your file is uploaded to R2 storage and served as-is. When you publish, a poster frame is generated in your browser — the server never re-encodes your video.

Why there's no transcoding

Per-video adaptive-bitrate ladders, storyboard generation at upload, and global CDN delivery are industrial systems. A reference build serves a single rendition and is honest about it: you get exactly the file you uploaded, at the quality you uploaded it. The demo videos ship with pre-generated sprite sheets for scrub previews; your uploads won't have those, and we don't pretend they do.

Chapters & scrub previews

The six demo videos include chapter markers (they segment the progress bar and appear in the hover preview) and storyboard sprite sheets (the little frame that appears when you hover the timeline). These are pre-generated at build time — the honest version of a feature that, at scale, rests on an invisible transcoding pipeline.

Playback is a reference build. Where a feature has a boundary — no transcoding, plays not audited views, owner-side moderation — we document it here rather than implying otherwise.

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