Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 68 posts

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#11

Post by senko »

dewey wrote: post #4

Is this just about not being on YouTube or in general any platform? Otherwise I'd check out Vimeo for pure video hosting without the "social" part. There's a good reason that these platforms exist as they deal with all the encoding edge cases and different devices your users may use.

This. Not all video hosting platforms are social networks.

Vimeo (mentioned), JWPlayer, Mux, there's tons of options.

You could get away by hosting an mp4 file on S3, but you lose seeking, support for bandwidth-responsive quality/resolution, support for every device under the sun, and metrics.

And it may not be cheaper. I got a surprise AWS bill when someone hotlinked to test video files I was hosting so people can download them and use locally. That one oops could've paid for Vimeo Pro subscription for a lifetime.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#12

Post by than3 »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #9

I have NO idea of how media or video works. So I'm just going to post this here in case someone knows better and helps me understand. I guess you could just upload all your videos to S3 and serve them over cloudfront. But Video seems to be tricky because there's the whole idea of encoding, adapting quality (detecting a poor connection and serving a low quality video, etc). What I chose some time ago was Mux, they had…

AFAIK, the only two good options these days are MPEG Dash (fMP4), or HLS.

Bento4 has tools for manipulating the containers depending on your needs, and its not difficult to setup, though you most likely will need to have a certificate and hosting infrastructure setup to allow the player to load the video (i.e. CORS).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#16

Post by phantomathkg »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #9

I have NO idea of how media or video works. So I'm just going to post this here in case someone knows better and helps me understand. I guess you could just upload all your videos to S3 and serve them over cloudfront. But Video seems to be tricky because there's the whole idea of encoding, adapting quality (detecting a poor connection and serving a low quality video, etc). What I chose some time ago was Mux, they had…

Upload your high resolution MP4 to S3, and open it to public only allow them to download.

To mimic what Youtube is doing, then yes you will need to transcode it to streamable chunk, in multiple bit rate, and then storage them. Assuming you are not applying your own DRM here.

As you can see, this is rather storage intensive and there aren't any free solution on this.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#17

Post by 411111111111111 »

senko wrote: post #11
dewey wrote: post #4

Is this just about not being on YouTube or in general any platform? Otherwise I'd check out Vimeo for pure video hosting without the "social" part. There's a good reason that these platforms exist as they deal with all the encoding edge cases and different devices your users may use.

This. Not all video hosting platforms are social networks. Vimeo (mentioned), JWPlayer, Mux, there's tons of options. You could get away by hosting an mp4 file on S3, but you lose seeking, support for bandwidth-responsive quality/resolution, support for every device under the sun, and metrics. And it may not be cheaper. I got a surprise AWS bill when someone hotlinked to test video files I was hosting so people can d…

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

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#18

Post by capableweb »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #3
viraptor wrote: post #2

There's quite a few tech people using peertube as either the only or an alternative for hosting. You still need to host the original, but if people watch your stuff, maybe you'll save some bandwidth on the p2p distribution.

Peertube is often very hard to load within MPV and you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other.

That's the tradeoff. Who do you trust to be able to something nefarious with your data?

One random person on the internet being able to see 1% of the videos you watch (the ones where you peered with them) VS one giant conglomerate being able to see 100% of the videos you watch?

Post reply on HN