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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

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Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#231

Post by lucb1e »

snowwrestler wrote: post #202
lucb1e wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative. Can confirm at least one tech news website argued this point and tore down their own video hosting servers in favor of using Youtube links/embeds. Old videos on tweakers.net are simply not accessible anymore, that content is gone now This was well after HTML5 was widely supported. As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard n…

It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave. Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

Is there someone in the world for whom this demo https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... does not play? Because that's what I use and am not aware of issues with it

> Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

It's hard to say whether MDN and I have/am better programmer(s) and resource(s) than reddit without having any examples or notions of what issues reddit has run into.

If you mean achieving feature-parity, like automatic subtitles and dubbing and control menus to select languages and format those subtitles etc., that's a whole different ball game of course. The site I was speaking of doesn't support that today either (they don't dub/sub), at best you get automatically generated Dutch subtitles from yt now, i.e. shit subtitles (worse than English autogen and we all know how well those deal with jargon and noise)

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#232

Post by lucb1e »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #147
fatchan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible. Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s. Big ups on keeping independent.

No lol nobody is reading the numbers. Vimeo is $20 / mo. Vimeo + $5 Linode server = $25 / mo, cheaper than the $30 / mo OVH server. The quoted ScaleEngine is $25 / mo, which ($25 + $5 = $30) the same as the OVH server. Y'all just have two different budgets. For one person $30 / mo is reasonable for the other it's expensive. But the core claim, that $5 / mo hosts a lot of non-video content but not much video content,…

Tbh, the $5 claim was in response to me but I never said any VPS would have the storage capacity to host a catalogue. I said any server. Call it my self-hoster's bias but I really did picture a hardware server with a hard drive in it, not a virtual access tier with artificial limits

But yeah okay, not any server variant can do this and the cloud premium is real. You'd need so spend like 5€/month on real hard drives if you want, say, 4TB of video storage on top of your existing website (the vimeo and dailymotion price points mentioned suggest that their catalogue is above 1 but below 2 TB). The 5€/month estimate is based on the currently most-viewed 4TB hard drive model in the tweakers pricewatch (some 100€), a modest average longevity of 5 years, triple redundancy, and that you would otherwise be running on smaller drives anyway for your normal website and images so there's no (significant) additional labor or electricity costs for storage (as in, you just buy a different variant of the same setup, not need to install additional ones)

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#233

Post by lucb1e »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #122
lelandbatey wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's me hosting a bunch of different bitrates of a high quality video, which I encoded on a 2016 laptop. http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/ The server is $30/month hosted by OVH, which comes with 2TB of storage. The throughout on the dedicated server is 1gbps. Unlimited transfer is included (and I've gone through many dozens of TB of traffic in a month).

I'm on mobile, but what player did you use on your website? Does it handle buffer?

Fwiw, the browser's built-in player does buffering. You don't need to custom-code that, you can just use . The browser also exposes via Javascript when it estimates that the download speed and buffer size is sufficient such that you can start playback without interruption: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaEl...

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#234

Post by lucb1e »

cogman10 wrote: post #212
snowwrestler wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave. Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people. Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video. Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular. If you don't hav…

> apply high quality compression on videos that become popular

Do they put a different amount of compression effort in if the video isn't (expected to become) popular?

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#235

Post by snowwrestler »

lucb1e wrote: post #231
snowwrestler wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave. Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

Is there someone in the world for whom this demo https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... does not play? Because that's what I use and am not aware of issues with it > Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers? It's hard to say whether MDN and I have/am better programmer(s) and resource(s) than reddit witho…

You're linking to a page with a 5 second 1MB video on it. Yes, it's easy to use the element to serve a video file no larger than a picture. No, that does not mean you have a system that will allow thousands of users to watch an 11 min HD video during their subway ride that starts instantly and never pauses, stutters, or locks up.

I can't speak to Dutch websites but in the U.S., a news website will usually feel obligated to provide subtitles on their videos to avoid lawsuits under the ADA.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#236

Post by fatchan »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #147
fatchan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible. Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s. Big ups on keeping independent.

No lol nobody is reading the numbers. Vimeo is $20 / mo. Vimeo + $5 Linode server = $25 / mo, cheaper than the $30 / mo OVH server. The quoted ScaleEngine is $25 / mo, which ($25 + $5 = $30) the same as the OVH server. Y'all just have two different budgets. For one person $30 / mo is reasonable for the other it's expensive. But the core claim, that $5 / mo hosts a lot of non-video content but not much video content,…

You misread the bandwidth cost part of my comment.

A $28/mo (Australian) vimeo subscription, or the "Advanced" $91/mo plan include the same 2TB bandwidth/month for viewers of your videos.

If you upload a 100MB video and it gets 20000 views the whole way through, you are now in the "contact sales" category of pricing.

This is why Youtube has a monopoly, because you've been badly tricked into thinking this pricing is fair and that 2TB is in any way shape or form adequate.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#237

Post by fatchan »

cocogoatmain wrote: post #118
fatchan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible. Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s. Big ups on keeping independent.

~~Likely much less than .25/m if that’s mbps. The issue is you’d have no shortage of money at that scale - I run one of the two main Arch Linux package mirrors in my country and while it’s admittedly a quite niche and small distro in comparison, I’m nowhere close enough to saturate 1gbit on normal days, let alone my 10gbit link~~ It’s a trade off I suppose - you can very well host your own streaming solution, and for…

Yeah, currently hosting LLHLS edge nodes in US + EU and caching CDN worldwide. The base cost grows if you have an audience of e.g. 2000 live viewers for a 2mbps stream = 4gbps.

Could be a lot cheaper and less need for global distribution if low latency weren't a requirement. And by low latency I mean the video stream you watch is ~2s behind reality just like Youtube, Twitch, Kick, etc. If your use case is VOD or can tolerate 10s latency streaming, single PoP works fine.

The point is that if I chose Vimeo or AWS/GCP/Azure for this, at their bandwidth pricing my (in my opinion modest) usage would be costing tens of thousands of dollars monthly, which it most certainly does not.

Managed service pricing and the perception of it needs to change, because it feels like a sham once you actually do anything yourself.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#239

Post by cogman10 »

lucb1e wrote: post #234
cogman10 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people. Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video. Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular. If you don't hav…

> apply high quality compression on videos that become popular Do they put a different amount of compression effort in if the video isn't (expected to become) popular?

I don't know what the Youtube compression queue looks like.

I'd not be shocked if they do more aggressive compression for well known creators.

For nobodies (like myself) the compression is very basic. Whatever I send ends up compressed with VP9 which, I believe, youtube has a bunch of hardware that can do that really fast.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#240

Post by noja »

drnick1 wrote: post #228
noja wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why everyone keeps repeating this. The fight is lost. Your data is being collected by the websites you visit and handed to Facebook via a proxy container. You will never see a different domain, it’s invisible to the end user.

Care to elaborate on the mechanisms at play? If what you claim is true, all websites would already serve ads from their own domain. The main issue I can see with this approach is that there would be an obvious incentive for webmasters to vastly overstate ad impressions to generate revenue.

Look up Facebook Conversions API Gateway
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