The End of an Open Source Journey: Archiving Vidify
Vidify was one of my first big software engineering projects, and I invested a tremendous amount of effort into its development. Supporting multiple platforms, building an audio synchronization extension, communicating between devices through DNS-SD, and releasing a website and Discord server were just some of the many tasks which helped shape my growth as a software developer.
The most rewarding part, however, was collaborating so closely with the open source community. I was able to influence the design of new libraries, such as Tekore, and improve existing ones, like RSpotify. Moreover, Vidify received a ton of help from contributors, including translating it to Chinese or Dutch, adding new video players, uploading it to Gentoo, or reporting and fixing all sort of issues. This experience is probably what led me to eventually love open source work.
Unfortunately, I have been neglecting Vidify for some time because of some
fundamental challenges, as I introduced in this
article. Our main dependency,
youtube-dl, was temporarily taken
down,
and Spotify rejected API access due to ToS
violations, among other issues.
Additionally, it has become harder for me to keep up with side projects; I am
now focusing on other aspects of life after recently relocating to a different
country to work for Lyft. While I believe Vidify could take off, it would
require a completely different approach and much greater scale, which is not
feasible for me in the near term.
The last commit on the desktop application was merged on December 2021, but there had already been no active development on it since the end of 2020. We’re now in 2023, and rather than keeping the status of the project uncertain, I would like to announce that I’m officially archiving all the repositories related 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, most importantly the Vidify TV application for Android:
The final two repositories are unfinished attempts at rewriting the desktop application to various languages. This is usually a terrible idea, but as I mentioned, Vidify was part of my learning process in this field, and I have no regrets :)
It has definitely taken me more time than necessary to do this, because it saddens me to abandon a project I had been so passionate about. But I know that the beauty of open source development lies in its ability to benefit others even after its original creator has moved on. By archiving the project instead of deleting it, anyone can continue to learn from its software and my accompanying articles, or even take on its development independently.
If you have any questions or plan to fork Vidify, feel free to reach out to me through the links in my personal website, nullderef.com.
Thanks to everyone who made this possible ❤️,
Mario