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GitHub has officially opened up video uploads five months after launching in beta, allowing all developers to include .mp4 or .mov files directly in pull requests, discussions, issues, comments, and more.
The feature is designed to help developers visually demonstrate to project maintainers the steps they went through when they encountered a bug, for example, or illustrate what a major new code change achieves in terms of functionality.
So rather than having to follow detailed step-by-step textual instructions which may be ambiguous or unclear, it’s now easier to see exactly what’s happening at the other end first-hand and should go some way toward avoiding time-consuming back-and-forth written discussions. This could also be used in conjunction with a voice track with a narrator explaining the on-screen actions.
Above: Video in GitHub
It’s worth noting that with this launch, GitHub also now fully supports video uploads from within its mobile app.
Above: Uploading video to GitHub via mobile app
Seeing is believing
Native video upload support helps bypass the cumbersome alternative involving recording and uploading a video to a third-party platform, then sharing a link. On that note, GitHub actually doesn’t yet support video unfurling from shared links, but that is something it said that it’s working on, alongside enabling video annotations for specific pieces of code.
At a time when the world has had to adapt to remote work and collaboration, learning to embrace asynchronous communication is one of the fundamental factors for distributed teams to succeed — recorded video plays a big part in enabling this.
