Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

I like this idea - but I worry about the cost.

YouTube is, essentially, free. Even if I don't want to use them as a host, I can upload a video and a few minutes later download it in DASH and a variety of older formats - again, for free.

If I do use them, I might get a few quid of advertising revenue.

CloudFlare video lets me keep people on my site (damn those distracting cat videos) and possibly gives me a branded player. That's nice - but is the cost of use (per minute transcoding) going to be worth it?

Lossless means lossless, i.e. you have no loss of information. The decompressed video is exactly what you had when you started. It's PNG (lossless) vs. JPG (lossy) or FLAC (lossless) vs. MP3 (lossy).

Of course lossless compression is typically a lot less compact than lossy alternatives (the article mentions a 1/2 compression ration, which is not much compared to lossy video codecs) but it means you're not degrading your video at all, you just have additional processing.

Note that some algorithms these days claim to be "visually lossless" which is mainly a marketing gimmick which means that it's lossy but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference with the naked eye in normal conditions (TICO claims that for instance).

This is commonly solved using Amazon S3 and single-access tokens I think?

Pretty hefty work involved in getting it reliable, would be nice for a "drop in" solution.

You can have lossless compressors tailor-made for specific applications who will typically achieve a better compression ratio than the "generic" compression algorithms WinRAR, ZIP and friends use.

For instance try zip'ing a WAV file and compare it to the same file encoded in FLAC. Typically FLAC will achieve better compression while still being lossless.

There are lossless video codecs, like VC-2 for instance. It's not very common in the consumer world however because people generally don't want to stream or store high definition video with a single digit compression factor (that single digit being generally around 2).

Lossless compression is where you reduce the file size without removing the audio / video data. Where as lossy compression is where you reduce the file size by reducing the audio / video content (typically using methods that are non-obvious to observers)

An easy but somewhat crude comparison would be a text file that reads:

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Lossless would be putting that content into a ZIP file (eg winzip / 7zip / etc).

Where as lossy would be rewriting the passage to something like:

“Space is really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Generally lossy compression will yield better compression because you can vastly reduce the information you need to compress and then apply lossless techniques as well.