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Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#41

Post by throwaway2016a »

I have a few sites I use AWS Elastic Transcoder to upload the videos to S3 and put CloudFront in front of it.

It works amazing. No ads. No third-party tracking. BUT it is not the cheapest solution. I have one site where there is an auto-play 5 minute HD video on the homepage and it costs $70 a month for just that video. But that's an extreme case, other lower traffic videos are very low cost (Obviously my workflow is very AWS centric. You could also successfully replace Elastic Transcoder with something like FFMPEG if you are open to doing more work to automate.

Still, you may want to consider one of the services optimized for video as they tend to offer lower cost and have transcoding built in.

To all the people saying to use Nginx or similar: you can do that. I strongly recommend putting a CDN in front of it, though. Because with video buffering a small change in latency can have a big effect and the CDN will make sure the video is served from geographically close edges.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dewey wrote: post #37
411111111111111 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimeo pivoted recentlish to big enterprise. They explicitly don't want smallish creators.

They have a "Starter" plan for $9/month and list "Small business" and "creative professionals" as their use cases. I wouldn't say they pivoted to big enterprise. They just pivoted to B2B in general and gave up on the consumer facing "indie-YouTube" side.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#43

Post by PaywallBuster »

readingnews wrote: post #40

I live in an area with symmetrical internet, so I host my own videos for mainly one reason (perhaps I am doing it wrong, but hey): I was uploading class videos during the pandemic. Youtube was taking so long to transcode, that by the time it was ready the class date had passed. I literally gave up trying to upload a 50min video. I am not going to beat up on youtube, but I followed the directions and it just did not s…

Haven't tried 50+ mins, but 10/20 mins usually done in 1/2 hours including HD transcoding?

I guess self hosting is good enough for you!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#44

Post by PaywallBuster »

chrismorgan wrote: post #38
robertlagrant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Cloudflare is one option - sample pricing[0]: Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market. Total cost: $78.00/month [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream

Cloudflare seems fairly expensive for on-demand (that is, uploaded ahead of time) video. They list their prices as $1/1000min delivered plus $5/1000min/month stored. I presume transcoding is included in those rates (since I don’t find any other line item). Translate Bunny’s pricing https://bunny.net/stream/ > to these numbers: $1/200GB delivered (assuming the volume network—the standard network is 2–12× the price, bu…

I guess their competition is AWS and the public cloud alikes, and pricing is good enough to compete

But yeah, "marketing driven" price

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#45

Post by rikroots »

gyulai wrote: post #6

My own personal webpage, which I made 5 years ago and which no one really ever looks at, is fully static. I just dropped mp4 files on my server, along with the other files and embedded them through HTML5's regular media tags. The whole thing gets served through apache. Works like a charm. The only reason it would need to get more complicated than that, in my mind, is if you're serving largish amounts of traffic.

This is similar to my approach to serving videos of me reading a few of my poems to my poetry website. It works mainly because nobody wants to watch me read my poems. I do worry about what would happen if one of those poems went viral - I couldn't afford additional costs from my webhost.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#46

Post by corobo »

dewey wrote: post #37
411111111111111 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimeo pivoted recentlish to big enterprise. They explicitly don't want smallish creators.

They have a "Starter" plan for $9/month and list "Small business" and "creative professionals" as their use cases. I wouldn't say they pivoted to big enterprise. They just pivoted to B2B in general and gave up on the consumer facing "indie-YouTube" side.

I wouldn't rely on those prices staying like that if you actually have an audience

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 [Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes (theverge.com)]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#47

Post by KronisLV »

readingnews wrote: post #40

I live in an area with symmetrical internet, so I host my own videos for mainly one reason (perhaps I am doing it wrong, but hey): I was uploading class videos during the pandemic. Youtube was taking so long to transcode, that by the time it was ready the class date had passed. I literally gave up trying to upload a 50min video. I am not going to beat up on youtube, but I followed the directions and it just did not s…

Currently self-hosting a PeerTube video as a backup for my Twitch VODs, maybe as a backup for the eventual YouTube account that I might have to make.

Even with low end hardware (e.g. 200 GEs as homelab servers, with 1 CPU core allotted to transcoding) generally transcoding is faster than the video itself. E.g. 2 hour videos will take less than 2 hours to transcode (1080p, 30fps, going from a bitrate of 7000 to closer to 3500 using H264). On an unrelated note, buying a Seagate HDD is way cheaper than buying that storage "in the cloud", as long as you have backups figured out.

Using my desktop (even kdenlive with CPU encoding, on an old Ryzen 5 1600, 6 cores and 12 threads), it happens even faster than that, albeit it's nice to be able to drag a video file into PeerTube and have it be automatically transcoded to both 1080p, 720p and 480p, for various devices/connection speeds.

I tested out VP8 (libre) a while ago but it was still somehow slower to encode and had larger file sizes than H264. I guess YouTube just doesn't give you as many resources given the large volume of videos that it needs to deal with.

In case anyone is interested:

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/en/

PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#48

Post by martin_a »

kornhole wrote: post #31
martin_a wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other. For whom it may concern: This would most likely be a violation of the GDPR for users from Europe. You'll have to state this in a cookie notice if you can't change it.

That notice is already built into peertube. It was mainly developed in France.

Très bonne! :-)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#49

Post by corobo »

jeena wrote: post #33
martin_a wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other. For whom it may concern: This would most likely be a violation of the GDPR for users from Europe. You'll have to state this in a cookie notice if you can't change it.

PeerTube shows a banner the first time you use it.

I just checked out your instance and the only time I saw a warning banner was a tiny little thing at the bottom of the screen when your video was already playing with me connected to 2 peers. No accept button, not even an opt out button.

Is that the stock install or did you add autoplay or something? I'm not sure I'd trust that to cover me under GDPR. It's a bit late by then.

Also doesn't GDPR require active opt-in consent rather than a "here's what we're doing" message? Seems a bit brittle.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#50

Post by giaour »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #41

I have a few sites I use AWS Elastic Transcoder to upload the videos to S3 and put CloudFront in front of it. It works amazing. No ads. No third-party tracking. BUT it is not the cheapest solution. I have one site where there is an auto-play 5 minute HD video on the homepage and it costs $70 a month for just that video. But that's an extreme case, other lower traffic videos are very low cost ( Obviously my workflow i…

> I have one site where there is an auto-play 5 minute HD video on the homepage and it costs $70 a month for just that video.

Are you serving the whole video file to every visitor? You might want to try using Cloudfront’s streaming support if you’re not already using it: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...

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