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I 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
by readingnews 4y ago
I 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/