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

blog.cloudflare.com

101–110 of 266 posts

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

#101
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read on for context, it sounds like they are comparing to the case where the customer simply sends some uncompressed video file, and pointing out that you might as well enable lossless compression in this case. However, CDNs (or somebody) introduce technical obstacles for this because they charge by bandwidth, so compression would hurt their profits.

> uncompressed video file 1920x1080 at 3 bytes per pixel and 30 frames per second is 11GB for just one minute of video, and 186MB per second. That's far too big and expensive to stream, and outside of somewhat special circumstances I've never heard of anyone storing video in such a huge format.

Agreed. We don't have the whole story here, I'm just trying to understand from context. Perhaps the thing that's being sent is not a raw video file, but some other file that could still be improved via lossless compression.

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

#102
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that you're using the Tor Browser? If you're shoving up your browser's traffic through Tor and its header is different from the Tor Browser you'll in most cases end up with a captcha. Edit: Also the event you described happened much earlier than when the drop of Cloudflare captchas happened, which was around if I remember correctly when Google announced "invisible captchas".

So how is that a solution? The problem is that Cloudflare blocks Tor, not Tor Browser: not every Tor user uses Tor Browser.

> So how is that a solution?

Well, it's not.

> The problem is that Cloudflare blocks Tor, not Tor Browser: not every Tor user uses Tor Browser.

Except the advice is, even when it does block Tor Browser, as they say it doesnt, the answer is to use Caching services.

The problem here is, it's now taboo to call these issues out. My posts' scores are -3, -1, and 1... I highlight this because it hid my main post. And alas, "-1" is used to silence legit grievances.

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea when the pricing will be finalized?

We have a good sense of the pricing but want to talk with more customers during the beta period. We're sure that it will be charged on something that doesn't create a perverse incentive against innovation (like per-byte pricing). Initially the pricing will be time based (e.g., per minute viewed) and we think we may be able to create a CPM price (i.e., per view regardless of length up to some limit). Our goal is to be…

Just to represent the people who like me will not be able to invest time considering your tech until pricing is available.

The pricing of the infrastructure has the potential to literally poison a product.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about on the monetization side of things? I know many YT firearms channels that have been basically blacklisted from monetization in recent months because YT classifies anything they do as "unsuitable for ads". It has forced a lot to double publish to https://www.full30.com/ to monetize their work.

YT has also been demonetizing videos on one of my favorite veterinary channels for being too graphic. It's a shame because they use the funds to provide care to abandoned animals. They always warn when videos contain surgery footage, even though it's relatively tame imho.

You're talking about VetRanch I assume? Yeah they are demonetizing Matt's DemolitionRanch and a number of other similar channels.

Whatever algorithm YT changed a few months ago is really putting a hurt on content creators for little gain. If certain advertisers don't want to be on channels with certain keywords they should be able to configure that, but wholesale demonetization is really stupid.

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

#105
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well ... the protocol was designed not do that. DNS is "just" a globally distributed, eventually consistent, key:value store, with a ton of caching built into it. Also, while it may look instant to you, it may not be to your customers / users / other internet people.

It's instant because CloudFlare isn't changing DNS records, just where its pointers point to. Look at it / try it.

I have, and I use it.

Thats not DNS, that is global load balancing.

Try using something other than HTTP over that FQDN.

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero.

What is my guarantee on that? Cloudflare has done it once, and I really don't know what political views would set the CEO off again. I hate what the stormidiots spout, but I'm pretty sure I don't trust Cloudflare anymore as neutral ground.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but you’re already replying to the CEO of Cloudflare.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero.

What is my guarantee on that? Cloudflare has done it once, and I really don't know what political views would set the CEO off again. I hate what the stormidiots spout, but I'm pretty sure I don't trust Cloudflare anymore as neutral ground.

Especially the post-hoc rationalizing they did in that blog post - that was just insulting. I just couldn't help but get the impression that whoever wrote it thinks that the readers are either ignorant or stupid. It's probably just that whoever had written it wasn't experienced in cleaning up a mess and never intended it to be that way though.

I would have hoped that their answer to impulsive decisions would be 'checks and balances' to prevent it from happening again.

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

#108

> There's no good technical reason not to enable lossless compression Why would you want to losslessly compress audio or video? The resulting files would be huge--often too huge to steam. Lossy compression is what you want. I must be misunderstanding the article?

My guess is they mean "visually lossless" i.e. "lossy" compression but with high quality settings so the user won't notice any difference.

That's a slightly odd way to phrase it, and I'm amazed that it's not a basic part of any streaming service these days, but makes more sense to me than the other suggestions.

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

#109
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well ... the protocol was designed not do that. DNS is "just" a globally distributed, eventually consistent, key:value store, with a ton of caching built into it. Also, while it may look instant to you, it may not be to your customers / users / other internet people.

While DNS caches can sometimes impact DNS updates, we rebuild the entire zone file when a DNS value is updated, and purge the previous cache. Even for customers, this should happen pretty quickly. We maintain a 5 minute TTL on all proxied records internally. So, this happens much faster than most other DNS services.

Yeah - that's a pretty standard way of doing things, and thats how DNS servers themselves will operate (mostly) when you make an update to a recordset.

Its not your cache that is the issue.

People have miss behaving caches, that do not always respect TTLs, some apps can cache the DNS response (I remember a Java issue where the initial value found was cached for the lifetime of the process!).

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

#110
post #54

If I wanted to create an alternative to YouTube with a conservative bent what are the chances Cloudflare will wake up one morning and shut me down? What if the content is just generally in "bad taste" and not overtly Neo-Nazi, will CF feel the need to play "Content Cop" or are they willing to abide by their role as utility?

Zero.

It’s going to take a lot more than that to convince skeptics and free speech advocates. Especially to anyone with a conservative or controversial position, those who probably have the largest incentive to move videos off of YouTube. Do you think Breitbart would trust you? What about the RNC? An eroge developer? What if 8chan wanted to add video uploads?

Trust is easy to lose and hard to gain.

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