31–40 of 68 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peertube is often very hard to load within MPV and you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other.
> 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.
Do you count using a cloud provider as hosting your own? The most basic pipeline for doing it is going to look something like this: 1) Upload the original video to a storage bucket. 2) Have some compute service transcode the video file to create other renditions. 3) Store those renditions in a different storage bucket. 4) Put a CDN service in front of the transcoded renditions. Get ready for a nice bandwidth bill if…
This 100%
I looked into it before and understandably, the badnwidth you can be using up for a relatively small amount of videos is always going to be pretty expensive. It is also not always easy to know in-advance, and do you want to suddenly get a 10x bill or have to cut-off your users when it gets expensive?
If you can afford to charge, then obviously it's different, otherwise YouTube's annoying advertising is paying for you...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peertube is often very hard to load within MPV and you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other.
> 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.
Do you count using a cloud provider as hosting your own? The most basic pipeline for doing it is going to look something like this: 1) Upload the original video to a storage bucket. 2) Have some compute service transcode the video file to create other renditions. 3) Store those renditions in a different storage bucket. 4) Put a CDN service in front of the transcoded renditions. Get ready for a nice bandwidth bill if…
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.
I'd just go with a video tag, containing the webm/av1/mp4 URLs, a poster image, and optionally subtitle tracks.
The first and most important thing is that you need to make sure your web server can serve ranged requests. Most web servers that serve static content should do fine, such as Apache and Nginx. If you have your own web server, make sure they respect Range headers and respond with the requested chunks. Most CDNs do, but servers provided by runtimes don't, such as the PHP built-in server. This is important for the browser to properly preload and seek videos embed.
I find third party video players unnecessary and added bloat. Several years ago, sure, that was when we had to fiddle with Flash players and all browser compatibility shenanigans. A standard HTML5 video player works great, it even hooks into Android media controls, bluetooth play/pause buttons, and picture-in-picture. Though I have not tried, none of the custom players can properly add subtitles/closed-captions to videos and make them work in Picture-in-Picture, apart from the standardized CC tracks. IIRC, Firefox had to bend over backwards and add custom workarounds to get Netflix CC to work in PiP. If it comes to that you need to use a custom player for consistency, I can highly vouch for Media Element JS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you count using a cloud provider as hosting your own? The most basic pipeline for doing it is going to look something like this: 1) Upload the original video to a storage bucket. 2) Have some compute service transcode the video file to create other renditions. 3) Store those renditions in a different storage bucket. 4) Put a CDN service in front of the transcoded renditions. Get ready for a nice bandwidth bill if…
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
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, but I would not expect it to be justified) plus $5/500GB/month stored, and transcoding is included in those rates.
Bunny is cheaper to deliver below 26⅔ Mbps, and cheaper to store where the sum of all transcoded forms is below 66⅔ Mbps. This will almost always be cheaper, normally much cheaper. It depends on the content, but your 1080p60 video is almost always under 10Mbps, probably under 5Mbps, not uncommonly well under 2Mbps. Your bill with Bunny will probably be less than a third of your bill with Cloudflare, and for typically more static sorts of content (e.g. programming tutorials), probably less than a tenth.
(I am presuming the products are roughly equivalent. This may or may not be true. I have used neither.)
I should also mention that Cloudflare’s sample pricing uses grossly unrealistic rates: they translate “500 GB of HD videos” into “1,200 minutes of video content”, which means 55 5⁄9 Mbps. “HD” tends to mean 1080p these days, though it does still get used for 720p too. (Some label 1440p and 2160p/4K as HD too, but I’d say they’re beyond it.) I accuse Cloudflare of using a rate that’s around four times too high. They don’t go into detail on their “typical public cloud provider” costs so I don’t know how realistic the rest is, but given how they’ve started with something that makes them look implausibly cheap, I’m not impressed.
Hosting my own is/was not too bad. The students had to wait a little longer. I did not hear too many complaints (really thought I would have heard a lot more "why can I not watch this on my youtube app on my phone").
Did not put too much effort into this post-semester, but I still do wonder what the heck other people do. I consider myself a serious veteran IT person, it is my (accidental) profession for decades. I have no idea how people upload 50+ min videos to youtube. I think I left one transcoding for 48 hours. It was not 50% done. I ensured I was using a codec youtube wanted, and even tried more. Ah well.
On the flip side, hosting on your own, you miss out on CDN reach and breadth and POPs that will cache for you. You will also dramatically miss out on speed. Then, if you have more than a few, what about indexing and search-ability? I do not like "big-corp" internet any more than the rest of us, I guess, but they have the infrastructure that we just do not have. A few videos for a class during a pandemic is one thing... but I would ask what your long term goal is in terms of the number of videos. This might change your mind as to how you want to distribute them.