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Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?
Hello,
I am preparing to soon upload all new video's I produce on to my own website instead of a platform.
I am asking if there is any one else who has done such a thing, so that I can look into subscribing to their RSS feeds and having things to watch that are not hosted on YouTube.
- videohoster 4y ago[flagged]
- imdoor 4y agoNSFW
- 411111111111111 4y agoNot feeling offended by pornography titles like "i was raped ..." is quiet hard, honestly. I have no issues with pornography itself, but that's extreme trigger material.
- videohoster 4y agoIt's not real title.. the content provider intentionally made it dramatic
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 411111111111111 4y agoYes, to fantasize about raping someone. Do you not understand what the word offensive means? Actual rape would've been straight up illegal with real consequences, including to the platform provider.
- viraptor 4y agoThere's quite a few tech people using peertube as either the only or an alternative for hosting. You still need to host the original, but if people watch your stuff, maybe you'll save some bandwidth on the p2p distribution.
- kornhole 4y agoInstalling peertube on my yunohost.org server was very easy thanks to the packaging provided. Joinpeertube.org can tell you more about the project. It is a social media project which means moderation is needed depending on how you choose to manage it.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoPeertube is often very hard to load within MPV and you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other.
- capableweb 4y agoThat's the tradeoff. Who do you trust to be able to something nefarious with your data? One random person on the internet being able to see 1% of the videos you watch (the ones where you peered with them) VS one giant conglomerate being able to see 100% of the videos you watch?
- martin_a 4y ago> you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other. For whom it may concern: This would most likely be a violation of the GDPR for users from Europe. You'll have to state this in a cookie notice if you can't change it.
- dewey 4y agoIs this just about not being on YouTube or in general any platform? Otherwise I'd check out Vimeo for pure video hosting without the "social" part. There's a good reason that these platforms exist as they deal with all the encoding edge cases and different devices your users may use.
- senko 4y agoThis. Not all video hosting platforms are social networks. Vimeo (mentioned), JWPlayer, Mux, there's tons of options. You could get away by hosting an mp4 file on S3, but you lose seeking, support for bandwidth-responsive quality/resolution, support for every device under the sun, and metrics. And it may not be cheaper. I got a surprise AWS bill when someone hotlinked to test video files I was hosting so people can download them and use locally. That one oops could've paid for Vimeo Pro subscription for a lifetime.
- 411111111111111 4y agoVimeo pivoted recentlish to big enterprise. They explicitly don't want smallish creators.
- dewey 4y agoThey have a "Starter" plan for $9/month and list "Small business" and "creative professionals" as their use cases. I wouldn't say they pivoted to big enterprise. They just pivoted to B2B in general and gave up on the consumer facing "indie-YouTube" side.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- corobo 4y agoI wouldn't rely on those prices staying like that if you actually have an audience https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 [Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes (theverge.com)]
- nxbp 4y agoJust have to nitpick: videos. Plurals don't have an apostrophe.
- Tepix 4y agoOP might be dutch. In dutch, nouns that end in the single vowels '–a', '-i', '-o', '-u', '-y' get a "-'s" when forming the plural. The apostrophe is added to keep the long single vowel at the end long. That's why dutch speakers frequently make this mistake.
- lbriner 4y agoJust to nitpick, Plurals CAN have an apostrophe if it makes a word readable that is otherwise hard to read like MOT'S https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/apostrophe/plurals https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/apostrophe/...
- gyulai 4y agoMy own personal webpage, which I made 5 years ago and which no one really ever looks at, is fully static. I just dropped mp4 files on my server, along with the other files and embedded them through HTML5's regular media tags. The whole thing gets served through apache. Works like a charm. The only reason it would need to get more complicated than that, in my mind, is if you're serving largish amounts of traffic.
- rikroots 4y agoThis is similar to my approach to serving videos of me reading a few of my poems to my poetry website. It works mainly because nobody wants to watch me read my poems. I do worry about what would happen if one of those poems went viral - I couldn't afford additional costs from my webhost.
- bertman 4y agohttps://fasterthanli.me/videos https://fasterthanli.me/videos This is a nice example imho.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoAV1 codec in a .mp4 container. That's the first time I seen that.
- kkfx 4y agoMh, I think you should clarify you target: - if the target is making money than you are tied to very popular platforms, because it's only there the largest public (unfortunately); - if the target is a selected audience you already know and they equally know you a feed publishing just new video URLs and files just dropped in a webserver suffice, you users only need to click the link to see, no web-crapplications nor WebVM (improperly named and known as browsers for legacy reasons) needed; - if the target is personal nothing beat a storage media in your pocket...
- santiagobasulto 4y agoI have NO idea of how media or video works. So I'm just going to post this here in case someone knows better and helps me understand. I guess you could just upload all your videos to S3 and serve them over cloudfront. But Video seems to be tricky because there's the whole idea of encoding, adapting quality (detecting a poor connection and serving a low quality video, etc). What I chose some time ago was Mux, they had a very good and developer friendly service.
- than3 4y agoAFAIK, the only two good options these days are MPEG Dash (fMP4), or HLS. Bento4 has tools for manipulating the containers depending on your needs, and its not difficult to setup, though you most likely will need to have a certificate and hosting infrastructure setup to allow the player to load the video (i.e. CORS).
- phantomathkg 4y agoUpload your high resolution MP4 to S3, and open it to public only allow them to download. To mimic what Youtube is doing, then yes you will need to transcode it to streamable chunk, in multiple bit rate, and then storage them. Assuming you are not applying your own DRM here. As you can see, this is rather storage intensive and there aren't any free solution on this.
- bullen 4y agoI host my own videos, 206 is the HTTP code I implemented in my own web server to get that to work, an example: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=4064110776042269443 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=4064110776042269443
- seper8 4y agoI use Azure Storage + BunnyCDN... Pretty cheap/easy.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoJust make sure to use the "volume" network as its much cheaper and latency matters far less for video.
- samarthr1 4y agoI am new to azure, but is the volume network for azure? Or is it for bunny?
- worldofmatthew 4y agobunny
- alexhackney 4y ago
- Apreche 4y agoDo you count using a cloud provider as hosting your own? The most basic pipeline for doing it is going to look something like this: 1) Upload the original video to a storage bucket. 2) Have some compute service transcode the video file to create other renditions. 3) Store those renditions in a different storage bucket. 4) Put a CDN service in front of the transcoded renditions. Get ready for a nice bandwidth bill if anyone actually watches your videos!
- robertlagrant 4y agoUsing Cloudflare is one option - sample pricing[0]: Streaming a library of 500 GB of HD videos over the course of one month with approximately 72,000 minutes of viewing time to a global market. Total cost: $78.00/month [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream
- chrismorgan 4y agoCloudflare seems fairly expensive for on-demand (that is, uploaded ahead of time) video. They list their prices as $1/1000min delivered plus $5/1000min/month stored. I presume transcoding is included in those rates (since I don’t find any other line item). Translate Bunny’s pricing <https://bunny.net/stream/ https://bunny.net/stream/> to these numbers: $1/200GB delivered (assuming the volume network—the standard network is 2–12× the price, but I would not expect it to be justified) plus $5/500GB/month stored, and transcoding is included in those rates. Bunny is cheaper to deliver below 26⅔ Mbps, and cheaper to store where the sum of all transcoded forms is below 66⅔ Mbps. This will almost always be cheaper, normally much cheaper. It depends on the content, but your 1080p60 video is almost always under 10Mbps, probably under 5Mbps, not uncommonly well under 2Mbps. Your bill with Bunny will probably be less than a third of your bill with Cloudflare, and for typically more static sorts of content (e.g. programming tutorials), probably less than a tenth. (I am presuming the products are roughly equivalent. This may or may not be true. I have used neither.) I should also mention that Cloudflare’s sample pricing uses grossly unrealistic rates: they translate “500 GB of HD videos” into “1,200 minutes of video content”, which means 55 5⁄9 Mbps. “HD” tends to mean 1080p these days, though it does still get used for 720p too. (Some label 1440p and 2160p/4K as HD too, but I’d say they’re beyond it.) I accuse Cloudflare of using a rate that’s around four times too high. They don’t go into detail on their “typical public cloud provider” costs so I don’t know how realistic the rest is, but given how they’ve started with something that makes them look implausibly cheap, I’m not impressed.
- jeena 4y agoHi, yes, I'm doing it on https://tube.jeena.net https://tube.jeena.net by using PeerTube. I've been hosting it on a NUC, first in my kitchen in Sweden, then at my parents house in Germany and now I'm in the process to move the NUC to my home office in South Korea. I'm bridging the time by having moved the whole installation to a server hosted by Hetzner, but it's too expensive in my opinion, and the NUC doesn't use so much power and is fast enough. I even made a video about my reasoning: Sustainable Private Cloud Server - Environment and Cost - https://tube.jeena.net/w/tYbrbqBMkexTwXTrjsN14a https://tube.jeena.net/w/tYbrbqBMkexTwXTrjsN14a
- hollywood_court 4y agoI’m not sure if this will help you much, but I followed this tutorial a few weeks ago to build what I believe you’re describing. It uses a MERN stack to build a “YouTube Clone.” I am in no way affiliated with its this creator. https://youtu.be/CCF-xV3RSSs https://youtu.be/CCF-xV3RSSs
- Ayesh 4y agoI host very small videos (screen captures of a CLI output, for example, and yes, I know ASCII cinema exists) on some of my web sites, and never had any major issues with them. I manually encode the video into webm and av1, and then serve the files via a CDN. I did not want to get into the complexity of serving adaptive and different bit-rates because the videos were just small ones. Handbrake can do a good job. I'd just go with a video tag, containing the webm/av1/mp4 URLs, a poster image, and optionally subtitle tracks. The first and most important thing is that you need to make sure your web server can serve ranged requests. Most web servers that serve static content should do fine, such as Apache and Nginx. If you have your own web server, make sure they respect Range headers and respond with the requested chunks. Most CDNs do, but servers provided by runtimes don't, such as the PHP built-in server. This is important for the browser to properly preload and seek videos embed. I find third party video players unnecessary and added bloat. Several years ago, sure, that was when we had to fiddle with Flash players and all browser compatibility shenanigans. A standard HTML5 video player works great, it even hooks into Android media controls, bluetooth play/pause buttons, and picture-in-picture. Though I have not tried, none of the custom players can properly add subtitles/closed-captions to videos and make them work in Picture-in-Picture, apart from the standardized CC tracks. IIRC, Firefox had to bend over backwards and add custom workarounds to get Netflix CC to work in PiP. If it comes to that you need to use a custom player for consistency, I can highly vouch for Media Element JS.
- dylan604 4y ago>If you have your own web server, make sure they respect Range headers and respond with the requested chunks. This is a pro on the HLS/DASH type of content. Even if the server doesn't respect ranges, this is still covered by the segment based encoding of HLS/DASH. Instead of asking the server to give a specified portion of a file, the playlists just requests a specific segment.
- dceddia 4y agoJust yesterday I was looking for how to do this too, and came across this article on how to create videos suitable for streaming (there’s even a Python script). https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2018-self-hosted-videos https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2018-self-hosted-videos
- readingnews 4y agoI live in an area with symmetrical internet, so I host my own videos for mainly one reason (perhaps I am doing it wrong, but hey): I was uploading class videos during the pandemic. Youtube was taking so long to transcode, that by the time it was ready the class date had passed. I literally gave up trying to upload a 50min video. I am not going to beat up on youtube, but I followed the directions and it just did not seem to work. Hosting my own is/was not too bad. The students had to wait a little longer. I did not hear too many complaints (really thought I would have heard a lot more "why can I not watch this on my youtube app on my phone"). Did not put too much effort into this post-semester, but I still do wonder what the heck other people do. I consider myself a serious veteran IT person, it is my (accidental) profession for decades. I have no idea how people upload 50+ min videos to youtube. I think I left one transcoding for 48 hours. It was not 50% done. I ensured I was using a codec youtube wanted, and even tried more. Ah well. On the flip side, hosting on your own, you miss out on CDN reach and breadth and POPs that will cache for you. You will also dramatically miss out on speed. Then, if you have more than a few, what about indexing and search-ability? I do not like "big-corp" internet any more than the rest of us, I guess, but they have the infrastructure that we just do not have. A few videos for a class during a pandemic is one thing... but I would ask what your long term goal is in terms of the number of videos. This might change your mind as to how you want to distribute them.
- PaywallBuster 4y agoHaven't tried 50+ mins, but 10/20 mins usually done in 1/2 hours including HD transcoding? I guess self hosting is good enough for you!
- KronisLV 4y agoCurrently self-hosting a PeerTube video as a backup for my Twitch VODs, maybe as a backup for the eventual YouTube account that I might have to make. Even with low end hardware (e.g. 200 GEs as homelab servers, with 1 CPU core allotted to transcoding) generally transcoding is faster than the video itself. E.g. 2 hour videos will take less than 2 hours to transcode (1080p, 30fps, going from a bitrate of 7000 to closer to 3500 using H264). On an unrelated note, buying a Seagate HDD is way cheaper than buying that storage "in the cloud", as long as you have backups figured out. Using my desktop (even kdenlive with CPU encoding, on an old Ryzen 5 1600, 6 cores and 12 threads), it happens even faster than that, albeit it's nice to be able to drag a video file into PeerTube and have it be automatically transcoded to both 1080p, 720p and 480p, for various devices/connection speeds. I tested out VP8 (libre) a while ago but it was still somehow slower to encode and had larger file sizes than H264. I guess YouTube just doesn't give you as many resources given the large volume of videos that it needs to deal with. In case anyone is interested: Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/en/ https://kdenlive.org/en/ PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
- throwaway2016a 4y agoI have a few sites I use AWS Elastic Transcoder to upload the videos to S3 and put CloudFront in front of it. It works amazing. No ads. No third-party tracking. BUT it is not the cheapest solution. I have one site where there is an auto-play 5 minute HD video on the homepage and it costs $70 a month for just that video. But that's an extreme case, other lower traffic videos are very low cost (< $0.10 / month). Obviously my workflow is very AWS centric. You could also successfully replace Elastic Transcoder with something like FFMPEG if you are open to doing more work to automate. Still, you may want to consider one of the services optimized for video as they tend to offer lower cost and have transcoding built in. To all the people saying to use Nginx or similar: you can do that. I strongly recommend putting a CDN in front of it, though. Because with video buffering a small change in latency can have a big effect and the CDN will make sure the video is served from geographically close edges.
- giaour 4y ago> I have one site where there is an auto-play 5 minute HD video on the homepage and it costs $70 a month for just that video. Are you serving the whole video file to every visitor? You might want to try using Cloudfront’s streaming support if you’re not already using it: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/on-demand-video.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
- throwaway2016a 4y agoI should have included more context. The average visitor downloads about half the video (based on the bandwidth usage stats). Unfortunately because of the nature of the page people tend to linger. That page gets a million+ hits a month and it's already using adaptive bitrate and resolution. Which the pipeline I mentioned can support. It's just a bad design IMO but I haven't been able to convince them to change it since the client believes (and may be right) that the video increases their sales enough per month to be worth it. It's all about your use case. If they were monetizing that video they would only need a penny per view to make a profit.
- guptaneil 4y agoIf you’re looking to self-host and are comfortable using AWS, I wrote a quick guide on the best way to self-host videos with the same performance as YouTube: https://neil.gg/2020/07/20/diy-video-streaming/ https://neil.gg/2020/07/20/diy-video-streaming/ I’ve used the same technique to host various videos over the years with zero issues, but the s3 charges can add up if you’re not careful since you’re storing multiple copies of the same video to enable adaptive streams.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoAWS is insanely expensive for video hosting.
- tmoehle 4y ago[dead]