Anyone wanted to browse a Youtube channel on Kiwix (there are hundreds available) was until recently faced with two major issues:
- Having dozens of videos made them huge and quite hard to download;
- The rendering was not great (to say the least), which did not encourage people to watch the content they’d just downloaded.
Exhibit one
And so we’ve done two things:
- Roll out a new compression algorithm that made every file 60% (yes, sixty percent) smaller.
- A new design for video page that more closely mimics that available on Youtube (minus all the junk)
The first one is a real game changer for anyone in low-connectivity settings. Storage isn’t much of an issue any more these days, but access is. And those internet tubes do not grow as fast as traffic (and apparently never will). So trying to pack as much data into as few bits as possible is still a major challenge.
The second one simply takes the obvious into account: people are much more likely to enjoy content if it is enjoyable to look at. And when dealing with educational material this is probably an oft-underlooked truth. And so we came up with this:
Exhibit #2
We will generate the new zim files over the next few weeks as part of the regular update process. In the meantime, you can always request a new zim from any freely-licensed channel: simply open a request at https://github.com/openzim/zim-requests/issues.
As usual, all code is freely available (GPL-3 license) and the full changelog is available here.
