GitHub has officially opened video uploads five months after launching the feature in beta and now allows all developers to include .mp4 or .mov files directly in pull requests, discussions, issues, comments, and more.
Video uploads are designed to help developers visually demonstrate to project maintainers the steps they took 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 potentially confusing step-by-step textual instructions, the next person to come along can now see exactly what's happening at the other end. This could also be used in conjunction with a voice track, with a narrator explaining the on-screen actions.
It's worth noting that with this launch, GitHub also now fully supports video uploads from within its mobile app.
As the world has had to rapidly adapt to remote work and collaboration, learning to embrace asynchronous communication is one of the factors essential to distributed teams' success, and recorded video could play a big part in enabling this process.