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> I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time. Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other stat

> I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time. Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other static file?

k__ 7y ago
What are the financial and technical implications of this?
- CodesInChaos 7y ago
  The financial implications depend a lot on your provider. AWS has usurious prices at 90 USD/TB, with Google Cloud and Azure being similarly expensive. While traditional hosters often include traffic with their offerings or charge a much lower amount. For example Hetzner (Big traditional German hoster) costs 1 EUR/TB and traffic is inclusive with most bigger/dedicated offers.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    > usurious Nitpick: you mean either "extortionate" or something to do with ogliopolies, cartels, and price fixing; usury is when the perpetrator charges interest on a non-defaultable loan.
    - pas 7y ago
      I think in this case this word was used for simple dramatic emphasis, and somehow usury seems like a more white-collar thing than extortion, so maybe felt like the better "analogy"?
- gog 7y ago
  That of course depends on how popular your videos becomes, but for the 99% videos I would say none since you already pay for hosting your web site.
- Santosh83 7y ago
  Technically its pretty easy with the video tag and HTML5. Financially it will probably not be an issue unless their videos become very popular and at that point they could always move elsewhere or pay for more bandwidth. But discoverability is an issue. People search for videos on Youtube, but no one will know about your personal domain.
  - k__ 7y ago
    I see... I think dev.to, the blogging platform I use, supports video-uploads too. Otherwise, I'll take a look into S3/CloudFront. Didn't even think that far, lol. Thanks for the info!
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Technically, your users will get a sub-par experience. Those on 3g will have to wait ages for the video to buffer. Those on an old device won't be able to play it at all if you used new codecs. Users won't be able to select playback quality, and on a slow connection, they'll get endless buffering. You'll have to come up with your own systems for counting how many people viewed the video and which bits they bailed out on. You'll have to reinvent caption translations and go to extra effort to get captions working at all. Self hosted videos have mostly died for the above reasons.
    - Santosh83 7y ago
      Adaptive streaming doesn't seem to be a difficult problem to solve. Most cloud providers offer video streaming services that can transparently sit in front of your domain or you can serve something like HLS or MPEG-DASH files through an appropriate js player. I must admit though I have no personal experience with this and am sure any home-rolled solution will be vastly inferior to Youtube et al, but it is possible and may satisfy the use cases of many people who don't want to put all their eggs into one basket.
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      You can provide links for different qualities and let user decide which one is better. Subtitles are supported by HTML video tag, you don't need to invent anything.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  One nasty implication is that adaptive bandwidth streaming as YouTube and Vimeo provide is tricky to get right. It’s definitely beyond “any other static file.” It’s a nice feature to allow clients to stream the max bitrate they can handle without buffering. Without this, you sacrifice either quality of those with good connections, or the complete experience of those with poor ones. I ended up struggling with ffmpeg and JPlayer which is never a good day. Additionally, you need to make sure you use the right codec, something supported on FF, Chrome, and Linux/Mac/Windows/Android/iOS. Due to codec power struggles, this is not self evident. Hosting video is harder than it seems :(
- aaronax 7y ago
  On Digital Ocean's S3-compatible service for example, $5/month gets you 250GB storage and 1TB egress. $0.02/GB additional storage and $0.01/GB additional egress. So if you have 5GB of videos that ALL get watched 10,000 times you will be out $500, so maybe problematic. Or calculated another way, 2.2mbps is good for 720p and comes out to 1GB/hour, so your cost is basically $0.01 per hour of video streamed (plus $5/month).
  - mongol 7y ago
    How does this change with a CDN on front? Are those prices similar, more expensive or less?
    - k__ 7y ago
      CloudFront is $0.085 per GB out, S3 is almost the same. But as far as I know, CF has more free traffic than S3.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    That's the case of premature optimization. You are not going to get even one video watched 10k times, not to mention all of those videos. 10K video views is pretty darn close to head rather than the tail. If you did, you would be making a million a year like @BrunchBoys on IG and hiring people to build an independent platform so when Youtube/Google/FB shut you down you would still have a way to deliver your awesome videos and make money. P.S. You can always proxy EC2 traffic through the Lightsail to have a cheap delivery.
    - pas 7y ago
      Or, you might get a random HN/Reddit (Slashdot, haha) hug of love, and that's -500 USD for you, and no +1 000 000 at the end of the year, because it was a one time thing.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        You might get 10k people to start watching a video. They're not each going to watch five hours.
- askz 7y ago
  You could host them on some peertube instance https://joinpeertube.org/en/#register https://joinpeertube.org/en/#register
gaius_baltar 7y ago
You can also use something like Peertube or another implementation of WebTorrent.

> I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time. Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other static file?

k__ 7y ago

What are the financial and technical implications of this?

CodesInChaos 7y ago
The financial implications depend a lot on your provider. AWS has usurious prices at 90 USD/TB, with Google Cloud and Azure being similarly expensive. While traditional hosters often include traffic with their offerings or charge a much lower amount. For example Hetzner (Big traditional German hoster) costs 1 EUR/TB and traffic is inclusive with most bigger/dedicated offers.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  > usurious Nitpick: you mean either "extortionate" or something to do with ogliopolies, cartels, and price fixing; usury is when the perpetrator charges interest on a non-defaultable loan.
  - pas 7y ago
    I think in this case this word was used for simple dramatic emphasis, and somehow usury seems like a more white-collar thing than extortion, so maybe felt like the better "analogy"?
gog 7y ago
That of course depends on how popular your videos becomes, but for the 99% videos I would say none since you already pay for hosting your web site.
Santosh83 7y ago
Technically its pretty easy with the video tag and HTML5. Financially it will probably not be an issue unless their videos become very popular and at that point they could always move elsewhere or pay for more bandwidth. But discoverability is an issue. People search for videos on Youtube, but no one will know about your personal domain.
- k__ 7y ago
  I see... I think dev.to, the blogging platform I use, supports video-uploads too. Otherwise, I'll take a look into S3/CloudFront. Didn't even think that far, lol. Thanks for the info!
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Technically, your users will get a sub-par experience. Those on 3g will have to wait ages for the video to buffer. Those on an old device won't be able to play it at all if you used new codecs. Users won't be able to select playback quality, and on a slow connection, they'll get endless buffering. You'll have to come up with your own systems for counting how many people viewed the video and which bits they bailed out on. You'll have to reinvent caption translations and go to extra effort to get captions working at all. Self hosted videos have mostly died for the above reasons.
  - Santosh83 7y ago
    Adaptive streaming doesn't seem to be a difficult problem to solve. Most cloud providers offer video streaming services that can transparently sit in front of your domain or you can serve something like HLS or MPEG-DASH files through an appropriate js player. I must admit though I have no personal experience with this and am sure any home-rolled solution will be vastly inferior to Youtube et al, but it is possible and may satisfy the use cases of many people who don't want to put all their eggs into one basket.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    You can provide links for different qualities and let user decide which one is better. Subtitles are supported by HTML video tag, you don't need to invent anything.
nothrabannosir 7y ago
One nasty implication is that adaptive bandwidth streaming as YouTube and Vimeo provide is tricky to get right. It’s definitely beyond “any other static file.” It’s a nice feature to allow clients to stream the max bitrate they can handle without buffering. Without this, you sacrifice either quality of those with good connections, or the complete experience of those with poor ones. I ended up struggling with ffmpeg and JPlayer which is never a good day. Additionally, you need to make sure you use the right codec, something supported on FF, Chrome, and Linux/Mac/Windows/Android/iOS. Due to codec power struggles, this is not self evident. Hosting video is harder than it seems :(
aaronax 7y ago
On Digital Ocean's S3-compatible service for example, $5/month gets you 250GB storage and 1TB egress. $0.02/GB additional storage and $0.01/GB additional egress. So if you have 5GB of videos that ALL get watched 10,000 times you will be out $500, so maybe problematic. Or calculated another way, 2.2mbps is good for 720p and comes out to 1GB/hour, so your cost is basically $0.01 per hour of video streamed (plus $5/month).
- mongol 7y ago
  How does this change with a CDN on front? Are those prices similar, more expensive or less?
  - k__ 7y ago
    CloudFront is $0.085 per GB out, S3 is almost the same. But as far as I know, CF has more free traffic than S3.
- notyourday 7y ago
  That's the case of premature optimization. You are not going to get even one video watched 10k times, not to mention all of those videos. 10K video views is pretty darn close to head rather than the tail. If you did, you would be making a million a year like @BrunchBoys on IG and hiring people to build an independent platform so when Youtube/Google/FB shut you down you would still have a way to deliver your awesome videos and make money. P.S. You can always proxy EC2 traffic through the Lightsail to have a cheap delivery.
  - pas 7y ago
    Or, you might get a random HN/Reddit (Slashdot, haha) hug of love, and that's -500 USD for you, and no +1 000 000 at the end of the year, because it was a one time thing.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      You might get 10k people to start watching a video. They're not each going to watch five hours.
askz 7y ago
You could host them on some peertube instance https://joinpeertube.org/en/#register https://joinpeertube.org/en/#register

gaius_baltar 7y ago

You can also use something like Peertube or another implementation of WebTorrent.