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Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#51

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

> they translate “500 GB of HD videos” into “1,200 minutes of video content”

Where does it say this? I can't find it.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#52

Post by dylan604 »

Apreche wrote: post #22

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…

1) Okay, but...

2) Why? There are plenty of blogs walking you through how to use FFMPEG to generate multibitrate HLS packages. I get faster than realtime encoding making 5 different bitrates.

2->1) Now you're only storing the highly compressed versions instead of the original (at whatever compression chosen for that)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#53

Post by dylan604 »

Ayesh wrote: post #36

I host very small videos (screen captures of a CLI output, for example, and yes, I know ASCII cinema exists) on some of my web sites, and never had any major issues with them. I manually encode the video into webm and av1, and then serve the files via a CDN. I did not want to get into the complexity of serving adaptive and different bit-rates because the videos were just small ones. Handbrake can do a good job. I'd j…

>If you have your own web server, make sure they respect Range headers and respond with the requested chunks.

This is a pro on the HLS/DASH type of content. Even if the server doesn't respect ranges, this is still covered by the segment based encoding of HLS/DASH. Instead of asking the server to give a specified portion of a file, the playlists just requests a specific segment.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#54

Post by throwaway2016a »

giaour wrote: post #50
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...

I should have included more context.

The average visitor downloads about half the video (based on the bandwidth usage stats). Unfortunately because of the nature of the page people tend to linger.

That page gets a million+ hits a month and it's already using adaptive bitrate and resolution. Which the pipeline I mentioned can support.

It's just a bad design IMO but I haven't been able to convince them to change it since the client believes (and may be right) that the video increases their sales enough per month to be worth it.

It's all about your use case. If they were monetizing that video they would only need a penny per view to make a profit.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#55

Post by chrismorgan »

robertlagrant wrote: post #51
chrismorgan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> they translate “500 GB of HD videos” into “1,200 minutes of video content” Where does it say this? I can't find it.

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/

> 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.

> Storage: $6.00 - Storage costs are based on 1,200 minutes of video content at $5 per 1,000 minutes stored.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#56

Post by videohoster »

411111111111111 wrote: post #20
videohoster wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Not feeling offended by pornography titles like "i was raped ..." is quiet hard, honestly. I have no issues with pornography itself, but that's extreme trigger material.

It's not real title.. the content provider intentionally made it dramatic

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#57

Post by guptaneil »

If you’re looking to self-host and are comfortable using AWS, I wrote a quick guide on the best way to self-host videos with the same performance as YouTube: https://neil.gg/2020/07/20/diy-video-streaming/

I’ve used the same technique to host various videos over the years with zero issues, but the s3 charges can add up if you’re not careful since you’re storing multiple copies of the same video to enable adaptive streams.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#58

Post by worldofmatthew »

guptaneil wrote: post #57

If you’re looking to self-host and are comfortable using AWS, I wrote a quick guide on the best way to self-host videos with the same performance as YouTube: https://neil.gg/2020/07/20/diy-video-streaming/ I’ve used the same technique to host various videos over the years with zero issues, but the s3 charges can add up if you’re not careful since you’re storing multiple copies of the same video to enable adaptive str…

AWS is insanely expensive for video hosting.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#59

Post by robertlagrant »

chrismorgan wrote: post #55
robertlagrant wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they translate “500 GB of HD videos” into “1,200 minutes of video content” Where does it say this? I can't find it.

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/ > 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. > Storage: $6.00 - Storage costs are based on 1,200 minutes of video content at $5 per 1,000 minutes stored.

Ah! I see.

Could this be because they pre-transcode to different bitrates, and have to store each version?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

#60

Post by [deleted] »

videohoster wrote: post #56
411111111111111 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not feeling offended by pornography titles like "i was raped ..." is quiet hard, honestly. I have no issues with pornography itself, but that's extreme trigger material.

It's not real title.. the content provider intentionally made it dramatic

[deleted]
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