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How Should We Improve DigitalFoundry.net? (Patreon)

Published:
2021-05-11 11:44:24
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Hi everyone - it's Rich here. First of all, thanks so much again for the continued support! We've blown away by the response and aim to repay you with great behind-the-scenes content, extras and early access. And if you're not part of our Discord, please join - it's awesome. Beyond that, the success of the Patreon relaunch has opened a lot of doors and we're looking to allocate tech resources to improving www.digitalfoundry.net. It's currently our video download portal, but how can we improve it and should it be more than that?

So, obviously, we've got ideas of our own ranging from the basic to the grandiose, but I guess the question is really this - what do you want from the site? Back in 2016 when the site launched, Patreon integration was limited. The API wouldn't even tell us which tier you were subscribed to, meaning that because of that, we can only supply exclusive content via hidden links right now. One of the key pieces of feedback so far has been that you want easier access to exclusive Patreon videos on the site. So it would make sense to have clearly signposted areas for Premium and Retro tier content and today's Patreon API lets us do that. 

Beyond that, we've had a lot of requests for a decent search facility - yes, you can type 'site:digitalfoundry.net [search term]' into Google and that works, but you want something better, right? Here's where you can make your suggestions.

Please feel free to share your ideas and don't be afraid to think big. Should we turn digitalfoundry.net into more than just a download site? Should the blogs and posts we do here live there instead? Should we be trying to supply a full-fat experience? 

We can't take on board all suggestions, obviously, but we are genuinely interested in getting an idea of what you want from the site. We currently use YouTube for embeds there, but what if we switched to a different on-site player and offered fully ad-free access both on downloads and streaming?

I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts and can't wait to see what ideas you have for the future of the site. Thanks!

Files

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Comments

Adabada Pling Boink-WeeeeeU

LG OLED WebOS support!. Should be pretty easy, since the video files are compatible, just set the Content-Disposition as inline instead of download. Remove the useless free videos too, merge the 1080 and 1080p categories, clean up the rest of the categories too.

Anonymous

Maybe I’m too stupid and missed it but I would love a chronological view of video uploads sorted by upload date, like viewing a channels video tab on YouTube.

Gian

* A more intuitive way to see the latest content (the latest videos section always seems to contain the same two "free download" videos on top) * A way to see the date a specific video was uploaded * A way to stream high res/high bitrate content, rather than having to download it.

xwurm
>>59596117

Yes I find the current system where you can filter by tags (4K,1080,HDR and so on) pretty weird. For 1080 there are even two different ones(1080 and 1080p)

Gabriel Ralls

One idea at the top of my head is user guides. Sometimes the videos show how to get the best TV settings on a specific OLED, but it's quickly done and easier for some viewers to see it as text. Another idea is to perhaps see a graphics / performance table with a slider, so users can slide to their platform to see the benchmark results (next to the accompanying video, of course) or have a slider for PC set-up where users can see recommended performance settings for their system. The latter might be a big ask and I'm not even a PC gamer, but I'm sure PC users would love something like that, or close to it.

Gabriel Ralls
>>59596071

I second WebOS support. Would be so great to be able to watch on my TV without needing to download to a USB, plug into my TV and watch. Because I'm on a Mac I can only download 4gig files to USB as my TV cannot read the same file formats.

Anonymous

Torrents as an option for the video downloads would be greatly appreciated!

The Dressing Gown

An app would be pretty awesome. Got several ideas, some more realistic than others but I'll list them all anyway 🙂 The ability to stream the content to a 4K TV would also be cool (if achievable). The ability to search videos by date, category, genre, console (generation), maybe even by franchise (say you wanted to see all COD games, or all Batman games, or all Halo games) would be good or even being able to combine aspects of each, maybe say all COD games on Xbox one pre 2019 for example, or even the ability to select a range say between dates or something. A search bar (not sure if this is already on desktop or not though). Perhaps having the ability to favourite videos and be able to view our favourite videos. And maybe even a watch later list (probably more useful to mobile users with lower storage capacity). The only other thing would be to have the free videos not be the first videos that appear, at least for supporters after logging in, perhaps always have the newest content displayed first. Edit: Another cool feature would be to be able to filter/search by who is in the video, probably the most useful reasoning for this would be for dev interviews or something, but it would be good to have.

Anonymous

When I’m viewing the list of videos on the front page, it would be nice to be able to change the download button to HVEC from h.264 so I don’t have to click on the video page and click the button there. This would be helpful because when I’m on the site I’m usually downloading multiple videos at a time

RealTime Shade Thrower

I'm still coming to grips with the (for my uninitiated dérives) navigation between EuroGamer, Patreon, and digitalfoundry.net and I’ll admit the thought of a bit of site consolidation + search support would go a million miles towards helping when I wonder if DF has already covered HDMI for GameCube (found it!) and how the “classic” consoles stack up to the originals and other forms of emulation (found several! And even learned a bit about FPGAs wrt emulation). But if I wanted to check out which raytracing discussions Alex has had, for example, I’m not yet sufficiently illuminated…

ConcreteLlama

I feel like a general organise and a way for the site to detect your tier so that you can access all videos available to you in one place should definitely be the first port of call. I know that's not a particularly adventurous suggestion but it would make the site infinitely better and is likely a relatively easy win compared to any fancy features people may currently have in mind. Maybe this is a niche suggestion but I'd love a way to be able to automatically download the latest videos - maybe through some kind of API and/or RSS feed - something flexible enough that it can be used on a headless server. I have a Linux server at home with Plex and it would be awesome to have the high quality videos automatically download and pop up in my library. I'm not suggesting that you implement an auto downloader for a bunch of platforms, but an API that will allow the task to be automated without requiring any manual intervention or a web browser.

Benjamin Addison

Just a relatively simple request from me - please date stamp the postings to digitalfoundry.net. Its entirely possible I am being dim and there is a date on there somewhere in which case my request is to make it more prominent.

Charles Roe

The ability to sort by platform would be pretty cool, especially for the retro content.

NekuSoul

I'll just throw a few ideas out there: * When logged in it would be nice if the featured and latest videos didn't have the free downloads taking up space. * HEVC download options for DF Direct would be nice. * Better access to the main categories (DF Direct, DF Retro, Tech Focus, Analysis videos) similar to the playlists on YT. * RSS feeds would be hugely appreciated and should be relatively easy to implement.

Anonymous

Though there could be reasons why this hasn't happened, but beyond Digital Foundry's own content, it would be great if there was some capacity to put up high bitrate versions of some of the trailers that come your way. Finding a place where you can download pristine 4K versions of trailers is hard -- perhaps by publisher design? -- but if it were possible, it would be a great resource to have. Even if it's just a limited selection of some that the team considers notable. Maybe even just as a Premium Supporter perk, since it would be "extra" to Digital Foundry.

Iain Stannard

I’m a fairly new subscriber, but I’ll be honest and say that I think the site is fine just as it is. It does what I want it to do - it’s a repository for your videos which are available to download. And that’s all that’s needed! It would be a shame to divert resources from working on videos and creating cumbersome admin all in the service of a slightly snazzier website. You just keep doing what you do best!

Anonymous

I would really like the ability to stream the videos via Chromecast.

Peter Frost

The main one for me would be to just simply have a latest release page with chronologically ordered videos. It would also be quite nice to have notifications from the web Notifications API, and/or an RSS feed

t00thr0t

Some sort of RSS feed for video links would be great to automate downloads of the high quality versions

Anonymous

To me the one "must have" feature currently missing is a master list of all videos on the site, sortable by date. It could be sortable by other criteria as well, but to me date is the key thing as it gives a user an immediate way to see all the videos they missed since the last time they visited the site. I've been hoping you guys would add this feature for a while, and I'm really glad to see you're looking to make improvements to the site now. But a couple years ago impatience got the better of me, and I coded a Firefox addon that does what I'm describing - lists all videos from digitalfoundry.net and allows sorting by date. (The trick was scraping your site's /sitemap.xml). The addon's available here for anyone who's interested - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/digital-foundry-video-feed - but honestly I think most people would prefer the site provide a master list-view itself 🙂.

Now and here

I would update the browse page to include pagination or (even better) lazy loading via scrolling. Currently its triggering a firehose of image requests due to the page loading every video at once. I'm assuming this is a PHP template, so pagination would likely be the easier solution. Moving beyond video, I think having other forms of content shared by the DF team would be appreciated from followers such as myself. Production notes, data references, and voting are some ideas you can share on your site with permission control based on Patreon's improved API. I would love to provide more feedback, or even provide guidance on navigating these decisions and the technology behind it. I've been doing this kind of work for 15 years and would be happy to lend my support.

Ray

I like the ideas of having a blog there for you guys, and using some sort of other embedded player like Vimeo or something for your embedded content so streaming doesn't have ads. It would be cool to also have biography pages for each Digital Foundry employee.

Aoba Seragaki

Similar to the chronological list of all videos, an RSS feed of new videos with the download link to the highest quality available for a tier would be great. Our internet here isn't the best and I have to manually sync to episodes to my Nas for later viewing

1040STF

The problem today is that you obviously didn't had any clue of where you were going when you designed this website, which is totally normal, and now it's a mess. I designed websites with complex database in another life : the more simple, forward-thinking and flexible it is, the better. So my ideas would be : You should do a main page with access to FEW general categories : - Access to videos by chronological order, like on Youtube (10 videos then a "more button" to get access them all, still in chronological order) - Access to Premium videos list (same here : 10 videos, etc) - Access to DF Retro Supporter videos list (10 videos etc) - A "search videos by game's name" page or research field. Internally, you have to be able to label every video with as many name of video games you want AND you have to be sure two contributors don't enter two different names for the same game. "Far Cry 4" and "FarCry 4" for exemple. It's key for the website to be enjoyable. This issue has to be solved with your webmaster. - A "search videos by tech subject" PS5, SSD, FPS Boost, One X optimisations, Ray Tracing, etc. Each one leads to a page with all the videos in a chronological order. - A "search videos by headers" page or research field : Tech Focus, DF Direct, DF Retro, etc. Each one leads to a page... (etc) Stop using keywords. They're responsible for the mess the website is now. The "1080p" section today is an aberration. The "3DS" section with only two games in it is another one. There's so many exemple I will stop here :-) I would love to see a page index "Videos classified by contributor". John, Rich, Alex, Tom, ... A simple one. You click on a name, and there you have all their videos (chronological order still !). I think I'm not the only one here to recognize my tastes more in a contributor than an other, so it would be interesting. - On that same page, maybe do the same with guests : MVG, My Life in Gaming, etc. - Always on the same page, a third categorie with the name of developpers interviewed. aaaand... That's it ! I think that would work perfectly. Add an ad for your Patreons subs, a contact form somewhere, credits, and there you go.

Stephen Szabo

The organization options, sorting, and searching need a drastic overhaul. As others have also said, an RSS feed would be great too! Some kind of API would be awesome too so we can automate the download of the higher quality video files.

Mat Azel

I wish dl speeds were a bit faster, (gigabit fiber on sata ssd), dl speeds are that not great.

1040STF

Why were my suggestions deleted ?... Were they too long ?

Mang0 Bandit0

Search by console and year is bout it

Dubuc Nathan

Maybe include your Eurogamer articles that come with the videos you make.

digitalfoundry

Just a quick point - if you see a feature request that you think is a great idea, please 'like' it so we can get some idea of how popular certain ideas are :)

Mr Fujisawa

definitely better search. but maybe groupings of videos under year/console etc. What about pages for each game? It could then contain all the videos for the game, what about integration with eurogamer articles? and ,aybe other stuff

Polyh3dron

Years ago when I became a patron and went to the DF website hoping for a treasure trove of downloadable high quality HDR videos, I was greeted on the front page by a then quite old Gran Turismo Sport HDR Sampler video and not a whole lot else. I opted out immediately. Now in 2021, I've once again joined at the highest tier since there is a relaunch going on. The same videos are on the website as before. Nothing has changed in the way of HDR content.

Anonymous

I would like an improvement of the alphabetical search. As it is it looks for titles that have any word in them that starts with the chosen letter, i.e. when you search games with the letter U it shows games like The Last of Us Part 2 or Assassin's Creed Unity as results high up while burrying games like Uncharted which start with U. It's fine that it shows these results of course but maybe it'd be better if it starts with titles where the desired letter is used at the beginning of the first word and then shows results that have other words that start with that letter.

The Wooniest Woona

Search is the big one for me, there's some videos that are really hard to find. You all are aware of this one though. I second the idea of an RSS feed for audio content. It would be great to pull down content like a podcast. I know there are other ways to distribute podcasts, but RSS is nice because it integrates well with a lot of older dedicated media players. I've got to wring out as much use as I can out of this old Zune of mine.

tobz619

Organisation by platform/vendor would be cool. I don't really use the site as I am happy with the YouTube content but yeah. Access to the merch store would be cool and yes, an RSS feed for the weekly podcast would be awesome!

kate

I would love a 'glossary' video where various graphical terms are explained for non-technical people, such as Ray tracing, BVH structure, Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, etc. I would also love to be able to stream certain DF videos like the DF weekly with no ads without having to download them.

Brian Rickard

Search and podcast feed for the df weekly. If the site knew your patreon tier that would be huge too. I want all the content and having two sources is inconvenient.

Anonymous

For me a clear, a dated list of all content on DigitalFoundry.net would be a great addition. My internet is very inconsistent, so I watch all DF content offline via the site since I started subscribing to avoid a sub 1080p YouTube experience.

André Scheffler

I'd like to have the ability to watch the videos directly on my TV using an App, or maybe a website that allows direct playback of the videos (don't know if the TV's browser does HDR content - would need to test that).

André Scheffler

I would definitely want to see 120 FPS content on the page 😉

Anonymous

A bit incidental to this, but still something that'd be great to see for patrons: a podcast feed for your weekly chats! I'd love to be able to listen from my phone instead of having to open youtube and minimize the window :)

tjapech

I would love to see the following: - Sort videos by date - Pagination or load more, so not everything is rendered at once - A bunch of filters e.g. platform, category

Anonymous
>>59698629

Would love to stream the HQ versions as well on every device. At least on iOS devices you can watch them directly and thus use Airplay to stream it to your TV.

Anonymous

Browse by Date would be nice to catch latest videos

Thomas Würgler

Being able to stream as well as download is the big one for me. I want to see higher quality, but I don't really want the files on my drive. Especially since it's an SSD.

Stefan Pitai

DF Retro episodes categorized on release date (if that hasn't been done as of yet...correct me if I'm wrong.) Big fan of that content, next to the regular DF content of course :)

Stefan Pitai
>>59929973

Oh wow thank you! That is very well done. I can add this to my Plex setup in the future. Very handy!

Corbin Lee

Search would be good obviously, but more than that I'd ideally like to browse, by show type and/or reverse chronological order to make sure I don't miss anything if I'm offline for a bit! Also, I realize this is very niche, but I'd personally love an RSS of new downloads, maybe separate h264 and HEVC feeds...I don't know how many other patrons would use that feature, but if you're already dedicating resources to sprucing up the site that's something I'd really love! Thanks for all you do, I truly appreciate every video.

Corbin Lee
>>59929973

Thank you for your service, I haven't gotten around to sorting my DF downloads for media server use, but I already appreciate you doing this. I've wanted to do something similar, both for this and Giant Bomb videos (props to every games media site that lets members download videos!), but haven't found the time to either do it manually or write a tool to automate that with the sites' respective APIs. Knowing you're out there doing this work motivates me to get back to it once I have the time.