We hope everyone is having a great New Year already and was able to sleep with all of the fireworks last night! 2021 went by pretty quickly for us but we still accomplished a lot last year:
We’ve made some updates to TinglyTube Messenger over the weekend, mainly code optimizations and minor bug fixes, but also added a new feature – Video chat! (on PC only)
You can video chat with any of your friends on TinglyTube by clicking on the video camera icon at the top of the chat window and if they’re online, a request will be sent for them to accept, meanwhile you’ll see the video chat interface, which is powered by Jitsi Meet, a free and secure video chat service that is quite similar to Zoom in terms of layout and features, of which there are plenty!
Depending on the resolution of both of your cameras, you’ll be able to chat in up to 720p HD with crystal clear audio.
As noted, video chat is currently only available on PC, but we intend to add support for it, announcements (on PC you'll sometimes see a popup above the Messenger bar, such as the one that might have brought you here, these are announcements), and bell notifications, on mobile soon.
We've also published a handly little help article to help you navigate and master the new video chat feature!
We hope these improvements make your experience on TinglyTube better and we'll continue to experiment and bake new ones up regularly (we've got a few ready for December!) and as always, if you need any help at all, please let us know via our Support/Feedback form.
If you've used Zoom or similar platforms before, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Messenger video chat interface should come pretty naturally to you, but if you need any help navigating the various features, this help article is for you!
How to Video Chat with Someone
In order to video chat with another user on TinglyTube, you and them will both need to be using PCs (as video chat is only supported on PC at this time, mobile support is coming soon) and they'll also need to be online or idle (otherwise you won't be able to send them a video chat request).
Click on the "Chat" tab on the Messenger bar which will launch your 'buddylist', this list displays all of your friends that are online currently or idle, then locate the user that you want to video chat with and click on them.
But if you're not friends with them (hence they won't show up in your buddylist) then go to their profile, once there click the speech bubble icon as shown below.
When you do either of these, a chat window will then pop up to where you'll see their username at the top, and 3 (three) icons to the far right of their name, the first icon will be a 
icon, click it! 
This will send the user a video chat request to which they can accept or deny (by not accepting it), while that happens, the video chat interface will open in a window on top of your current browser window, here you can enter the name you'd like to be identified as in the call, this can be your username or any other name you'd like to use, you can also configure your camera/microphone from this screen as well, as well as see whether or not your microphone is working properly (there should be a green dot at the bottom of the box on your screen).
Navigating the Video Chat Interface
Once you've entered your name, and the user you've called has hopefully joined, you'll see a dark toolbar hovering at the bottom of the window, let's go over what each button does:
We’re excited to announce that TinglyTube has recently become IPv6 enabled!
For those who don’t know what IPv6 is, IPv6 is the successor to IPv4, almost all IP addresses use IPv4 (a typical IPv4 address looks like 161.97.75.223 – whereas, a typical IPv6 address looks like 2a02:c207:2040:9691:0000:0000:0000:0001) however because IPv4 addresses can only store 32-bits, the pool of them will become depleted one day, which is why IPv6 was created in 1998 to eventually replace IPv4 one day as it can store 128-bits and provide more addresses to the ever-growing internet.
Statistics reported by Google show that over 32% of internet users are IPv6 enabled as of November 10, 2021.
Even though IPv6 has been around for many years, its adoption has still been slow (mainly because IPv4 addresses are still plenty because of their 'blocks' being purchased and resold), but some ISP’s (Internet Service Provider’s) provide IPv6 connections and many of the tech giants, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are IPv6 enabled which allow for a fast and seamless connection for IPv6 users.
But since most of the internet is still using IPv4, even if you have an IPv6 connection, your ISP uses something called NAT (Network Address Translation) this allows you to access websites that are using IPv4 even though you’re using IPv6, however, this process does add a few more milliseconds to the time it takes to load each page and its individual assets (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images, etc.) as well as for your connection to look up that website’s IPv4 address and ‘translate’ it to one that you can access.
Milliseconds might not seem like a very big deal, but to us, it is, as we want to ensure that every TinglyTube user has a fast experience when they need ASMR the most.
If you’re not sure whether or not your internet connection is IPv6 enabled, you can go to this website to check.
There shouldn't be any issues experienced due to this ‘upgrade’, however, if you need any help at all or a question answered, as always, please don’t hesitate to let us know via our Support/Feedback form.
If you’ve ever uploaded a video on TinglyTube before, you’ll know that after it uploads, you won’t instantly see it until a little while has passed, this is because your video is being processed, this involves your video getting encoded into an MP4 file in multiple resolutions that are optimized for internet playback and its' thumbnails are generated, however, it's always been hidden away from you without any way to see what your video's current status is, until now...
Starting today, once your video is successfully uploaded, you'll be redirected to a page where you can see your Video's Upload Status (Thumbnails are being generated, Resolutions are being encoded, Video is waiting in the queue to be processed - hover over or tap the Question mark icon to see a detailed description of what's happening to your video) along with a preview of one of your video's thumbnails (if available) as well as the ability to delete your video while it's in the processing queue.
Along with this improvement, we've also made the upload progress bar bigger and made it so that you can see your video's upload percentage :)
We hope that these improvements will make your uploading experience better and more straightforward, we'll always continue to experiment with more ways to do so in the future.
If you have any feedback for us or are experiencing any bugs with the new Upload Status feature or anything else, please let us know via our Support/Feedback form.
