6 ms·

How does that work? Can I just dumb two terabytes of video into Backblaze B2, setup a Cloudflare account and have people watch those videos with it costing me o

by Hamuko 7y ago

How does that work? Can I just dumb two terabytes of video into Backblaze B2, setup a Cloudflare account and have people watch those videos with it costing me only $10 a month? Because that doesn't sound right.

hartator 7y ago
Curious as well.
varikin 7y ago
I believe you still pay Cloudflare costs, but the traffic between Cloudflare and B2 is free on both platforms. But it might be worth double-checking the fine print.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  Isn't the Cloudflare CDN included in the free plan as well?
  - shockinglytrue 7y ago
    CloudFlare's free plan can and does end at any moment, I wouldn't rely on it for any serious application
  - georgyo 7y ago
    It is, but they cap out the file size they will cache on the free plan to be 512MB. So you would need to chunk up your videos to get free bandwidth.
    - derefr 7y ago
      > So you would need to chunk up your videos to get free bandwidth. Having a functional video player on your site or in your app (e.g. one where you can skip to arbitrary times without requiring the video be buffered up to that point; or where a video can be "resumed" from the middle if you leave it and come back) already requires that you use MPEG-DASH or HLS; which in turn implies/necessitates pre-chunking, no? Is there some use-case where people are currently serving 400MB contiguous video files from a CDN? I can't think of one. YouTube doesn't. Netflix doesn't. Even porn sites don't. I guess Archive.org has some large video files on there in various places, that can be direct-downloaded; but the recommendation Archive.org itself makes, is to consume those via BitTorrent. Presumably they don't have a CDN partner willing to handle their unique workload for cheap.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        > Having a functional video player on your site or in your app (e.g. one where you can skip to arbitrary times without requiring the video be buffered up to that point; or where a video can be "resumed" from the middle if you leave it and come back) already requires that you use MPEG-DASH or HLS; which in turn implies/necessitates pre-chunking, no? Browsers are smart. They only buffer a few megabytes at a time and can seek around pretty efficiently.
        derefr 7y ago
        That requires the video to be encoded in a way where you can just start reading the stream from any random byte offset, and everything will still work. Video files are not usually encoded this way (any more.) Resume an MP4 or MKV video half-way through, without reading the TOC-ish stuff from the first chunk, and you'll get garbage that maybe resyncs after 20 seconds. It's totally possible to "encode for streaming", but it usually results in both an increase in overhead [more keyframes] and a decrease in quality [inability to use predictive interpolation, instead relying only on forward-interpolation.] Mind you, this streaming-enabled encoding is how things were done on the web, before the advent of MPEG-DASH/HLS; and it's still how e.g. the MP2 encoding of digital cable/satellite video works. But we don't really want to go back to those days. They kind of sucked. Jumping to random byte offsets in a video also tends to screw with any embedded data streams like subtitles or thumbnails, which tend to just be stored in most media container formats as a single chunk at the beginning/end of the file, rather than being spread or copied across the stream. Again, the kind of captioning done back in the MP2 days is immune to this, but it kind of sucked as well (e.g. it wouldn't trigger if you happened to skip to the millisecond after the instruction for it appeared in the stream, often leaving you with ~30 seconds of untranslated audio.)
        anderspitman 7y ago
        That's odd. I can't recall ever having a problem with browsers playing mp4s in a vanilla <video> tag, as long as I encode them in the main h264 profile, AAC audio, and MOOV atom at the front (see [0] for ffmpeg command). Obviously the server has to support Range: byte requests. My impression is DASH/HLS are mostly useful for adjusting bitrate on the fly. [0]: https://superuser.com/a/438471/402047 https://superuser.com/a/438471/402047
heipei 7y ago
The Cloudflare ToS explicitly exclude that use-case. 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications and rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents. Use of the Service for serving video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.
- DoctorOW 7y ago
  From what I can tell that's more about their caching service. It mentions exceptions for hosting from a paid service and correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't Backblaze be that paid service?
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    They are talking about their own paid service, obviously. I don't think they care whether you are paying for someone else's product or not.
  - celicaraptor 7y ago
    Perhaps they are talking about a paid service that they offer,like Cloudflare Stream https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
- mikehearn 7y ago
  In a previous HN post [1] where someone wrote up how to use B2 as an image host, the Cloudflare CEO chimed in and addressed rule 2.8 specifically, saying if Cloudflare workers are used for URL prettifying and redirecting, a different ToS is applied and that use-case would be fine. Does that mean your video use-case would also be fine? I have no idea. An HN comment from the CEO doesn't seem like it would hold up if Cloudflare suddenly shut down your free account. I'd love for Cloudfront to officially clarify the limits of the Cloudfront/B2 alliance in terms of external traffic. The confounding issue here is that B2, as a storage service, is not really intended for "serving web pages and websites" — it's for larger files, binaries, etc. — and therefore any traffic from B2 going through Cloudfront is sort of de facto in violation of 2.8. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857
Dylan16807 7y ago
Cloudflare's main service excludes video.
- tpmx 7y ago
  This is key for many.
celicaraptor 7y ago
This thread might help https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857
anon102010 7y ago
This is huge if true - folks keep on saying Cloudflare can replace cloudfront for free. If we could put 20TB of binary content for software distro / videos etc on B2, then stream by cloudflare I'd actually believe the claims. Every time we've tried this with other "free" providers there always seems to be "fine print" when you start pushing huge bandwidth on these "unlimited" plans. It seriously is not worth the time at some point.
chx 7y ago
The way I understand, you can do this with images, eastdakota confirmed that here earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660 not sure about videos.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by Hamuko 7y ago

hartator 7y ago

Curious as well.

varikin 7y ago

I believe you still pay Cloudflare costs, but the traffic between Cloudflare and B2 is free on both platforms. But it might be worth double-checking the fine print.

Hamuko 7y ago
Isn't the Cloudflare CDN included in the free plan as well?
- shockinglytrue 7y ago
  CloudFlare's free plan can and does end at any moment, I wouldn't rely on it for any serious application
- georgyo 7y ago
  It is, but they cap out the file size they will cache on the free plan to be 512MB. So you would need to chunk up your videos to get free bandwidth.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > So you would need to chunk up your videos to get free bandwidth. Having a functional video player on your site or in your app (e.g. one where you can skip to arbitrary times without requiring the video be buffered up to that point; or where a video can be "resumed" from the middle if you leave it and come back) already requires that you use MPEG-DASH or HLS; which in turn implies/necessitates pre-chunking, no? Is there some use-case where people are currently serving 400MB contiguous video files from a CDN? I can't think of one. YouTube doesn't. Netflix doesn't. Even porn sites don't. I guess Archive.org has some large video files on there in various places, that can be direct-downloaded; but the recommendation Archive.org itself makes, is to consume those via BitTorrent. Presumably they don't have a CDN partner willing to handle their unique workload for cheap.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > Having a functional video player on your site or in your app (e.g. one where you can skip to arbitrary times without requiring the video be buffered up to that point; or where a video can be "resumed" from the middle if you leave it and come back) already requires that you use MPEG-DASH or HLS; which in turn implies/necessitates pre-chunking, no? Browsers are smart. They only buffer a few megabytes at a time and can seek around pretty efficiently.
      - derefr 7y ago
        That requires the video to be encoded in a way where you can just start reading the stream from any random byte offset, and everything will still work. Video files are not usually encoded this way (any more.) Resume an MP4 or MKV video half-way through, without reading the TOC-ish stuff from the first chunk, and you'll get garbage that maybe resyncs after 20 seconds. It's totally possible to "encode for streaming", but it usually results in both an increase in overhead [more keyframes] and a decrease in quality [inability to use predictive interpolation, instead relying only on forward-interpolation.] Mind you, this streaming-enabled encoding is how things were done on the web, before the advent of MPEG-DASH/HLS; and it's still how e.g. the MP2 encoding of digital cable/satellite video works. But we don't really want to go back to those days. They kind of sucked. Jumping to random byte offsets in a video also tends to screw with any embedded data streams like subtitles or thumbnails, which tend to just be stored in most media container formats as a single chunk at the beginning/end of the file, rather than being spread or copied across the stream. Again, the kind of captioning done back in the MP2 days is immune to this, but it kind of sucked as well (e.g. it wouldn't trigger if you happened to skip to the millisecond after the instruction for it appeared in the stream, often leaving you with ~30 seconds of untranslated audio.)
        anderspitman 7y ago
        That's odd. I can't recall ever having a problem with browsers playing mp4s in a vanilla <video> tag, as long as I encode them in the main h264 profile, AAC audio, and MOOV atom at the front (see [0] for ffmpeg command). Obviously the server has to support Range: byte requests. My impression is DASH/HLS are mostly useful for adjusting bitrate on the fly. [0]: https://superuser.com/a/438471/402047 https://superuser.com/a/438471/402047

heipei 7y ago

The Cloudflare ToS explicitly exclude that use-case. 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications and rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents. Use of the Service for serving video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.

DoctorOW 7y ago
From what I can tell that's more about their caching service. It mentions exceptions for hosting from a paid service and correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't Backblaze be that paid service?
- jjeaff 7y ago
  They are talking about their own paid service, obviously. I don't think they care whether you are paying for someone else's product or not.
- celicaraptor 7y ago
  Perhaps they are talking about a paid service that they offer,like Cloudflare Stream https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
mikehearn 7y ago
In a previous HN post [1] where someone wrote up how to use B2 as an image host, the Cloudflare CEO chimed in and addressed rule 2.8 specifically, saying if Cloudflare workers are used for URL prettifying and redirecting, a different ToS is applied and that use-case would be fine. Does that mean your video use-case would also be fine? I have no idea. An HN comment from the CEO doesn't seem like it would hold up if Cloudflare suddenly shut down your free account. I'd love for Cloudfront to officially clarify the limits of the Cloudfront/B2 alliance in terms of external traffic. The confounding issue here is that B2, as a storage service, is not really intended for "serving web pages and websites" — it's for larger files, binaries, etc. — and therefore any traffic from B2 going through Cloudfront is sort of de facto in violation of 2.8. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857

Dylan16807 7y ago

Cloudflare's main service excludes video.

tpmx 7y ago
This is key for many.

celicaraptor 7y ago

This thread might help https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857

anon102010 7y ago

This is huge if true - folks keep on saying Cloudflare can replace cloudfront for free. If we could put 20TB of binary content for software distro / videos etc on B2, then stream by cloudflare I'd actually believe the claims. Every time we've tried this with other "free" providers there always seems to be "fine print" when you start pushing huge bandwidth on these "unlimited" plans. It seriously is not worth the time at some point.

chx 7y ago

The way I understand, you can do this with images, eastdakota confirmed that here earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660 not sure about videos.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]