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Can I just like, buy some file hosting, scp AV1 files to it and embed them on my blog, these days?

by Joeboy 5y ago

giantrobot 5y ago
You can but you've created a shitty experience. With AV1 you've excluded at least half your potential viewers. Even for people with a browser with AV1 support your files likely have a higher bitrate than your viewers can stream in real-time. If you want to just "upload files" you're going to be encoding a dozen different versions and bundling them as HLS/MPEG-DASH to not have a shitty client experience. You're going to need a fair amount of storage and a big pipe to handle multiple simultaneous streams. Also caching is a Hard Problem since not every version of a piece of content has equal levels of viewership at any given time. YouTube and Vimeo (and the rest) handle all the storage, bandwidth, and transcoding. It's not something that you're going to do well without a lot of domain knowledge first. The market is littered with the corpses of companies that underestimated the difficulty and expense of streaming video over the web. It's certainly not so difficult as to be impossible, it's just non-trivially difficult and potentially expensive.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  This. And it seems the cost of networking is on the rise. Not per kb of course, but relative to the media economy at play. I don't see how a small player can enter the market: - creators expect no fees or a low fee and no ads - viewers now expect 1080p or even 4k option, and 60 frames/s. Thanks h265, but even with the best compression out there the math doesn't add up to make a profit. Perhaps that comes down to the fact feeding data is more expensive, even as a business and at scale, than to pull data as an individual with a home broadband. Unless you are Google, aws, or cloudflare and have leverage over other networks providers. Decentralized solutions is our last hope. I say hope because it still isn't quite working performance-wise for the use case of streaming.

Can I just like, buy some file hosting, scp AV1 files to it and embed them on my blog, these days?

by Joeboy 5y ago

Can I just like, buy some file hosting, scp AV1 files to it and embed them on my blog, these days?

You can but you've created a shitty experience. With AV1 you've excluded at least half your potential viewers. Even for people with a browser with AV1 support your files likely have a higher bitrate than your viewers can stream in real-time. If you want to just "upload files" you're going to be encoding a dozen different versions and bundling them as HLS/MPEG-DASH to not have a shitty client experience. You're going to need a fair amount of storage and a big pipe to handle multiple simultaneous streams. Also caching is a Hard Problem since not every version of a piece of content has equal levels of viewership at any given time. YouTube and Vimeo (and the rest) handle all the storage, bandwidth, and transcoding. It's not something that you're going to do well without a lot of domain knowledge first. The market is littered with the corpses of companies that underestimated the difficulty and expense of streaming video over the web. It's certainly not so difficult as to be impossible, it's just non-trivially difficult and potentially expensive.

hirako2000 5y ago
This. And it seems the cost of networking is on the rise. Not per kb of course, but relative to the media economy at play. I don't see how a small player can enter the market: - creators expect no fees or a low fee and no ads - viewers now expect 1080p or even 4k option, and 60 frames/s. Thanks h265, but even with the best compression out there the math doesn't add up to make a profit. Perhaps that comes down to the fact feeding data is more expensive, even as a business and at scale, than to pull data as an individual with a home broadband. Unless you are Google, aws, or cloudflare and have leverage over other networks providers. Decentralized solutions is our last hope. I say hope because it still isn't quite working performance-wise for the use case of streaming.