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Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

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Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#21

Post by whynotmakealt »

chrismorgan wrote: post #14
simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

Unfortunately, proximity can be important. I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency (since most developers aren’t at all careful about avoiding request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth, 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds longer). Austral…

Hmm, I am Indian and I'd love to experiment with the setup, I have a 40 mbps fibre and I think my upload speed is very limited and I'd love if there are ways to replicate your setup? (maybe any websites which can do what you basically did and give me some stats which I can later share here?)

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#22

Post by dewey »

skydhash wrote: post #16
jshen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other issue is that it's expensive. You can put a video on youtube for free and they carry the cost and cover it with advertising. If you self-host and your videos get a LOT of traffic it gets expensive quickly.

LOT of traffic is a big if. A lot of videos only have 1k+ views and I will believe those are mostly drive-by viewing. Using a CDN can help you if you go viral.

A video CDN isn't cheap though, so outsourcing that to YouTube is the best option for most people.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#23

Post by bradgessler »

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

I just setup private video for https://beautifulruby.com and can confirm the trickiest part is setting up and hosting HLS.

I extracted a RubyGem at https://github.com/beautifulruby/hls that I use to point at a folder full of videos, then my scripts converts them into HLS and uploads them to a private Tigris S3 bucket. I then have to rewrite playlists from the server with pre-signed S3 URLs.

It’s not that it’s difficult per se, but it does require a meticulous attention to detail to put all the pieces together.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#24

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

[deleted]

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#25

Post by embedding-shape »

hamdingers wrote: post #20
skydhash wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s solved by CDN.

So it remains an unsolved problem for self-hosting.

Depends on what exactly you mean with "self-hosting". As in you can run your own dedicated servers across the world, with one or more providers, and run all the software yourself, have your own CDN. Varnish works great for that. If you're limited to "self-hosting as in hosted in my home" then yeah it gets harder. Maybe P2P/P2P-like thing could help if you're dealing with public content, like PeerTube?

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#26

Post by chrismorgan »

jshen wrote: post #13
simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

The other issue is that it's expensive. You can put a video on youtube for free and they carry the cost and cover it with advertising. If you self-host and your videos get a LOT of traffic it gets expensive quickly.

I feel people are often unreasonably scared by this sort of thing, so here are some numbers to give perspective and aid in decision-making.

Bunny CDN charge $5/TB for their volume network, which should be pretty good for video distribution, reducing after 500TB/month.

At a bitrate of 5Mbps (respectable for 1080p, significant overkill for more static types of content, as technical stuff will tend to be), 1TB is 444 hours. If, like OP, you publish 90-second videos, that’s 17,777 complete watches per terabyte. Depending on your situation, that might sound like not much or like a lot.

Put the other way round, at 5Mbps and $5/TB, each watch-hour costs $0.01125, a bit over one cent, and it takes 3,555 people watching your 90 second video to cost one cent.

For the sort of scale that most people are dealing with, it’s simply not an issue.

I don’t know if bots upset this balance. They may.

If you actually are spending more than a terabyte per month on it, then for technical audiences at least, I suspect that if you invited donations to specifically cover hosting costs (something along the lines of “I host these videos myself because ads and relying on YouTube are both bad for society; if you feel inclined, you can donate to help cover the cost, currently about $X/month”) you’d very quickly get a surplus. Or for longer-form content, charge something for 4K video (which costs 4.5¢ per watch-hour at 20Mbps and $5/TB) and let that subsidise the free 1080p (costing 1.125¢ per watch-hour) stream.

(On the $5/TB figure: my $5/month Vultr VPS includes 1TB per month, and charges $10/TB after that. Some VPS providers include a lot more; a Hetzner €3.49/month VPS in Europe includes 20TB then charges €1/TB. But remember, if you host video from one point only, that it is unlikely to work well for people halfway round the planet. See another of my comments in this thread for description.)

As for storage: each 90-second 5Mbps video is 56.25MB, and at a rate of $0.01/GB/month, each one will cost you $0.00675 per year to keep. Were you to post one 90-second video every single day and keep them all online, your monthly bill would grow by about $0.20 each year.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#27

Post by chrismorgan »

simonw wrote: post #18
chrismorgan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, proximity can be important. I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency (since most developers aren’t at all careful about avoiding request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth, 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds longer). Austral…

Sure, but CDNs for static content feel to me like effectively a solved problem in 2025. There are plenty of good providers and some of them are practically free. I mean sure, if you want to roll your own CDN by hosting boxes in colos across multiple continents and applying geographical load balancing via DNS you're taking on a whole lot of extra complexity, but I think outsourcing that to Cloudflare or Fastly or Fly.…

I want self-hosting to mean only hosting (as in, speaking HTTP) from servers that I control. I acknowledge this is not exclusively how the term is used any more, but I do think it’s still at least a preferable goal.

I want to self-host things. Currently I use a VPS. I’m planning on trying out hosting from home. Either way, if I get into doing much multi-megabit-per-second video stuff, hosting of that bit will definitely be going behind some CDN.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#28

Post by tracker1 »

simonw wrote: post #10
tracker1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was curious about Cloudflare's pricing as a comparison... it looks like $1 per 1000 minutes viewed, which means a 10 minute video will cost #1 to have 100 views... That just seems prohibitively expensive to me, it's pretty much 100% of the lower end of video advertising just for delivery fees. I know there are competing and cheaper services, but it still seems to be a big burden to get into. I've been trying to use R…

$1/1,000 minutes is the pricing for Cloudflare's "Cloudflare Stream" product, which is specifically about live video streaming: https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/pricing/ If you're not streaming live I believe you can serve video content out of R2 instead, which still somehow only charges for storage but offers completely free outbound bandwidth (egress).

I may be misremembering, but I thought R2 terms disallowed video streaming content... I'm unable to find any references to this now, though I didn't do an exhaustive search.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#29

Post by jadbox »

JimDabell wrote: post #11
simonw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1/1,000 minutes is the pricing for Cloudflare's "Cloudflare Stream" product, which is specifically about live video streaming: https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/pricing/ If you're not streaming live I believe you can serve video content out of R2 instead, which still somehow only charges for storage but offers completely free outbound bandwidth (egress).

Cloudflare Stream isn’t just for live-streaming, it’s for generic video hosting too. It does transcoding, adaptive bitrate, HLS, etc. It’s terrible and you shouldn’t use it, but it does a lot more than just serve static video files like R2.

Just to add, you should never serve video straight from R2 unless you pre-render all your videos for all major devices. Otherwise you get very, very subpar device buffering performance. Generally use R2 as a cache layer over your stream processor (CF Stream).
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