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Internet video is stupidly simple these days, now that the Flash requirement is long dead: export your video in H.264 and WebM to cover all of your bases (Firef

Internet video is stupidly simple these days, now that the Flash requirement is long dead: export your video in H.264 and WebM to cover all of your bases (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari, and iOS Safari all support H.264, WebM is supported by Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari on MacOS 11.3 or later, Safari on iOS 15 or later and Android Chrome.) Then you can just upload it to an S3/CloudFront bucket and slap a <video> tag on literally any web site. It's basically as simple as serving images these days. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/video https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi... Most of your garden variety blog/CMS engines have plugins that can even automatically take media uploads and stash them on Amazon or a similar CDN. For something that's not even that big, that might even be overkill. If the amount of data transferred monthly is low enough, you could probably just serve it off a VPS.

jraph 5y ago
This is probably not quite enough in many cases. You may need a search engine that indexes your videos, a comment section, a way to refer to sections of the videos, something that provides several versions / qualities so the video can be viewed on any internet connection but still be available in high quality when this is possible, adaptive streaming, and many other things I'm not thinking of. All that in a user interface optimized for videos. You can probably implement a part of these features imperfectly in a regular CMS and with the video tag, but you may as well use readily-available software that do this job for you well. If you host, occasionally, one or two videos, that's probably the best thing to do, but if you are to create a channel, you are probably better of using dedicated software.
- xwdv 5y ago
  And of course, people always forget about accessibility for those with disabilities. Everyone making their own half baked video solutions creating a more user-hostile web for the disabled.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I mean you can just throw more cloud services at the problem* and use AWS video transcription. It works fine. About as well as MS and Google automated transcriptions. * I think it’s dubious that S3 & CloudFront is really DIY anyway but hey, if you already broke the seal.
matvp 5y ago
That's a very primitive approach. Once you're dealing with adaptive formats (DASH, HLS) containing multiple renditions (different bitrates) and/or codecs, it gets more complicated. I get that a single h264 codec/mp4 (webm) container file is easy enough as it is widely supported but once you're dealing with larger video's and getting them served over different connection types/speeds, it gets trickier. Atleast with services like Vimeo/YouTube, you don't have to bother too much.
- chii 5y ago
  > Once you're dealing with adaptive formats (DASH, HLS) containing multiple renditions (different bitrates) and/or codecs, it gets more complicated. but why does it need to have all these different formats and bitrates?
  - gruez 5y ago
    >different formats varying devices/platforms support varying formats >bitrates so some guy on watching on a 3G connection doesn't need to watch your 4K stream.
    - chii 5y ago
      Fancy features will cost more. But just a plain old video file on s3 works fine enough for must purposes.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Well, that's what they sell. Vimeo charges reasonably for transcoding and storing all these different versions of videos. YouTube does it for free to stifle competition and stay the only place advertisers can go if they want a captive audience (with TikTok and Facebook, both also free, being their only real competitors). If I had to actually recommend a service it'd be Cloudflare Stream[0], which allows you to upload videos, CF transcodes them, and you get a link to a page with just the video player[1], and they offer options like only allowing embeds on certain origins and disabling/enabling MP4 downloads. The pricing is fairly reasonable as well at $1 per 1,000 watch minutes and $5 per 1,000 minutes of stored video. 0: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ 1: https://watch.videodelivery.net/b9d528d5eece459b80113823cefd73d9 https://watch.videodelivery.net/b9d528d5eece459b80113823cefd...
gruez 5y ago
>Then you can just upload it to an S3/CloudFront bucket and slap a <video> tag on literally any web site. You know how much cloudfront bandwidth costs? $0.085/GB. Vimeo has a 2TB/month limit before they "may reach out to discuss a more suitable plan for your needs". If you consume that much bandwidth, it would already be costing you $170/month on AWS for the bandwidth alone. I suspect viemo's plans are still going to be cheaper.
j1elo 5y ago
One disadvantage is that this forces less technical users to learn about technical details of media, which itself can get very complex. For example you seem to know your way with the solutions you propose, but I already see an issue, as in reality WebM is a format limited to VP8 and VP9, and cannot contain H.264 video. But Chrome ignored this limitation and wrote a muxer that is actually able to store H.264 inside WebM files, thus going out of spec... which means different tools might have different degrees of support for those files. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=980822 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=980822 Arguably, a former user of YouTube or Vimeo shouldn't have to learn about all this, and shouldn't have to end up reading bug reports such as that one (and this is just scratching the can of worms that is all the topic of codecs, encodings, containers, etc.)

jraph 5y ago

This is probably not quite enough in many cases. You may need a search engine that indexes your videos, a comment section, a way to refer to sections of the videos, something that provides several versions / qualities so the video can be viewed on any internet connection but still be available in high quality when this is possible, adaptive streaming, and many other things I'm not thinking of. All that in a user interface optimized for videos. You can probably implement a part of these features imperfectly in a regular CMS and with the video tag, but you may as well use readily-available software that do this job for you well. If you host, occasionally, one or two videos, that's probably the best thing to do, but if you are to create a channel, you are probably better of using dedicated software.

xwdv 5y ago
And of course, people always forget about accessibility for those with disabilities. Everyone making their own half baked video solutions creating a more user-hostile web for the disabled.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I mean you can just throw more cloud services at the problem* and use AWS video transcription. It works fine. About as well as MS and Google automated transcriptions. * I think it’s dubious that S3 & CloudFront is really DIY anyway but hey, if you already broke the seal.

matvp 5y ago

That's a very primitive approach. Once you're dealing with adaptive formats (DASH, HLS) containing multiple renditions (different bitrates) and/or codecs, it gets more complicated. I get that a single h264 codec/mp4 (webm) container file is easy enough as it is widely supported but once you're dealing with larger video's and getting them served over different connection types/speeds, it gets trickier. Atleast with services like Vimeo/YouTube, you don't have to bother too much.

chii 5y ago
> Once you're dealing with adaptive formats (DASH, HLS) containing multiple renditions (different bitrates) and/or codecs, it gets more complicated. but why does it need to have all these different formats and bitrates?
- gruez 5y ago
  >different formats varying devices/platforms support varying formats >bitrates so some guy on watching on a 3G connection doesn't need to watch your 4K stream.
  - chii 5y ago
    Fancy features will cost more. But just a plain old video file on s3 works fine enough for must purposes.
judge2020 5y ago
Well, that's what they sell. Vimeo charges reasonably for transcoding and storing all these different versions of videos. YouTube does it for free to stifle competition and stay the only place advertisers can go if they want a captive audience (with TikTok and Facebook, both also free, being their only real competitors). If I had to actually recommend a service it'd be Cloudflare Stream[0], which allows you to upload videos, CF transcodes them, and you get a link to a page with just the video player[1], and they offer options like only allowing embeds on certain origins and disabling/enabling MP4 downloads. The pricing is fairly reasonable as well at $1 per 1,000 watch minutes and $5 per 1,000 minutes of stored video. 0: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ 1: https://watch.videodelivery.net/b9d528d5eece459b80113823cefd73d9 https://watch.videodelivery.net/b9d528d5eece459b80113823cefd...

gruez 5y ago

>Then you can just upload it to an S3/CloudFront bucket and slap a <video> tag on literally any web site. You know how much cloudfront bandwidth costs? $0.085/GB. Vimeo has a 2TB/month limit before they "may reach out to discuss a more suitable plan for your needs". If you consume that much bandwidth, it would already be costing you $170/month on AWS for the bandwidth alone. I suspect viemo's plans are still going to be cheaper.

j1elo 5y ago

One disadvantage is that this forces less technical users to learn about technical details of media, which itself can get very complex. For example you seem to know your way with the solutions you propose, but I already see an issue, as in reality WebM is a format limited to VP8 and VP9, and cannot contain H.264 video. But Chrome ignored this limitation and wrote a muxer that is actually able to store H.264 inside WebM files, thus going out of spec... which means different tools might have different degrees of support for those files. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=980822 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=980822 Arguably, a former user of YouTube or Vimeo shouldn't have to learn about all this, and shouldn't have to end up reading bug reports such as that one (and this is just scratching the can of worms that is all the topic of codecs, encodings, containers, etc.)