3 ms·

> and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative. Can confirm at least one tech news website argued this point and tore down their ow

by lucb1e 1y ago

> and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative. Can confirm at least one tech news website argued this point and tore down their own video hosting servers in favor of using Youtube links/embeds. Old videos on tweakers.net are simply not accessible anymore, that content is gone now This was well after HTML5 was widely supported. As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard now that we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page. They made it sound like they need to employ an expensive developer to continuously work on improving this and fixing bugs whereas from my POV you're pretty much there with running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this) and having a quality selector below the video. Can't imagine what about this would have changed in the past decade in a way that requires extra development work. At most you re-evaluate every 5 years which quality levels ffmpeg should generate and change an integer in a config file... Alas, little as I understand it, this tiny amount of extra effort, even when the development and setup work is already in the past(!), is apparently indeed a driving force in centralizing to Youtube for for-profits

jacobgkau 1y ago
> As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard now that we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page. You acknowledge that it's not that simple: > running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this) Can any old server really handle that? And can it handle the resulting storage of not only the highest-quality copy but also all the other copies added on top? My $5 Linode ("any old server") does not have the storage space for that. You can switch your argument to "storage is cheap these days," but now you're telling people to upgrade their servers and not actually claiming it's a one-click process anymore. I use Vimeo as a CDN and pay $240 per year for it ($20/month, 4x more than I spend on the Linode that hosts a dozen different websites). If Vimeo were to shut down tomorrow, I'd be pretty out of luck finding anyone offering pricing even close to that-- for example, ScaleEngine charges a minimum of $25 per month and doesn't even include storage and bandwidth in their account fee. Dailymotion Pro offers a similar service to Vimeo these days, but their $9/month plan wouldn't have enough storage for my catalog, and their next cheapest price is $84/month. If you actually go to build out your own solution with professional hosting, it's not gonna be a whole lot cheaper. Obviously, large corporations can probably afford to do their own hosting-- and if push came to shove, many of them probably would, or would find one of those more expensive partner options. But again, you're no longer arguing "it's just an HTML tag." You're now arguing they should spend hundreds or thousands per year on something that may be incidental to their business.
- is_true 1y ago
  Have you tried cloudflare r2?
- lelandbatey 1y ago
  Here's me hosting a bunch of different bitrates of a high quality video, which I encoded on a 2016 laptop. http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/ http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/ The server is $30/month hosted by OVH, which comes with 2TB of storage. The throughout on the dedicated server is 1gbps. Unlimited transfer is included (and I've gone through many dozens of TB of traffic in a month).
  - fatchan 1y ago
    People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible. Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s. Big ups on keeping independent.
    - cocogoatmain 1y ago
      ~~Likely much less than .25/m if that’s mbps. The issue is you’d have no shortage of money at that scale - I run one of the two main Arch Linux package mirrors in my country and while it’s admittedly a quite niche and small distro in comparison, I’m nowhere close enough to saturate 1gbit on normal days, let alone my 10gbit link~~ It’s a trade off I suppose - you can very well host your own streaming solution, and for the same price you can get a great single node, but if you want good TTFB and nodes with close proximity to many regions you may as well pay for a managed solution as the price for multiple VPS/VM stacks up quickly when you have a low budget Edit: I think I missed your point about bandwidth pricing lol, but the second still stands
      - fatchan 1y ago
        Yeah, currently hosting LLHLS edge nodes in US + EU and caching CDN worldwide. The base cost grows if you have an audience of e.g. 2000 live viewers for a 2mbps stream = 4gbps. Could be a lot cheaper and less need for global distribution if low latency weren't a requirement. And by low latency I mean the video stream you watch is ~2s behind reality just like Youtube, Twitch, Kick, etc. If your use case is VOD or can tolerate 10s latency streaming, single PoP works fine. The point is that if I chose Vimeo or AWS/GCP/Azure for this, at their bandwidth pricing my (in my opinion modest) usage would be costing tens of thousands of dollars monthly, which it most certainly does not. Managed service pricing and the perception of it needs to change, because it feels like a sham once you actually do anything yourself.
snowwrestler 1y ago
It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave. Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?
- cogman10 1y ago
  It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people. Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video. Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular. If you don't have a huge viewership or dynamic content then yeah, it's actually pretty easy to setup and run videos sites (infowars has managed it). Target h264 and aac audio with a set number of resolutions and bitrates and viola, you've got something that's pretty competitive on the cheap that can play on pretty much any device. It's not optimal for bandwidth, for that you need to start sniffing client capabilities. However, it'll get the job done while being pretty much universally playable.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Thing with Infowars is, they got a lot of rich people and probably Russia paying the bills. Video hosting still is damn expensive if you are not one of the top dogs.
  - lucb1e 1y ago
    > apply high quality compression on videos that become popular Do they put a different amount of compression effort in if the video isn't (expected to become) popular?
    - cogman10 1y ago
      I don't know what the Youtube compression queue looks like. I'd not be shocked if they do more aggressive compression for well known creators. For nobodies (like myself) the compression is very basic. Whatever I send ends up compressed with VP9 which, I believe, youtube has a bunch of hardware that can do that really fast.

by lucb1e 1y ago

jacobgkau 1y ago

> As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard now that we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page. You acknowledge that it's not that simple: > running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this) Can any old server really handle that? And can it handle the resulting storage of not only the highest-quality copy but also all the other copies added on top? My $5 Linode ("any old server") does not have the storage space for that. You can switch your argument to "storage is cheap these days," but now you're telling people to upgrade their servers and not actually claiming it's a one-click process anymore. I use Vimeo as a CDN and pay $240 per year for it ($20/month, 4x more than I spend on the Linode that hosts a dozen different websites). If Vimeo were to shut down tomorrow, I'd be pretty out of luck finding anyone offering pricing even close to that-- for example, ScaleEngine charges a minimum of $25 per month and doesn't even include storage and bandwidth in their account fee. Dailymotion Pro offers a similar service to Vimeo these days, but their $9/month plan wouldn't have enough storage for my catalog, and their next cheapest price is $84/month. If you actually go to build out your own solution with professional hosting, it's not gonna be a whole lot cheaper. Obviously, large corporations can probably afford to do their own hosting-- and if push came to shove, many of them probably would, or would find one of those more expensive partner options. But again, you're no longer arguing "it's just an HTML tag." You're now arguing they should spend hundreds or thousands per year on something that may be incidental to their business.

is_true 1y ago
Have you tried cloudflare r2?
lelandbatey 1y ago
Here's me hosting a bunch of different bitrates of a high quality video, which I encoded on a 2016 laptop. http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/ http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/ The server is $30/month hosted by OVH, which comes with 2TB of storage. The throughout on the dedicated server is 1gbps. Unlimited transfer is included (and I've gone through many dozens of TB of traffic in a month).
- fatchan 1y ago
  People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible. Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s. Big ups on keeping independent.
  - cocogoatmain 1y ago
    ~~Likely much less than .25/m if that’s mbps. The issue is you’d have no shortage of money at that scale - I run one of the two main Arch Linux package mirrors in my country and while it’s admittedly a quite niche and small distro in comparison, I’m nowhere close enough to saturate 1gbit on normal days, let alone my 10gbit link~~ It’s a trade off I suppose - you can very well host your own streaming solution, and for the same price you can get a great single node, but if you want good TTFB and nodes with close proximity to many regions you may as well pay for a managed solution as the price for multiple VPS/VM stacks up quickly when you have a low budget Edit: I think I missed your point about bandwidth pricing lol, but the second still stands
    - fatchan 1y ago
      Yeah, currently hosting LLHLS edge nodes in US + EU and caching CDN worldwide. The base cost grows if you have an audience of e.g. 2000 live viewers for a 2mbps stream = 4gbps. Could be a lot cheaper and less need for global distribution if low latency weren't a requirement. And by low latency I mean the video stream you watch is ~2s behind reality just like Youtube, Twitch, Kick, etc. If your use case is VOD or can tolerate 10s latency streaming, single PoP works fine. The point is that if I chose Vimeo or AWS/GCP/Azure for this, at their bandwidth pricing my (in my opinion modest) usage would be costing tens of thousands of dollars monthly, which it most certainly does not. Managed service pricing and the perception of it needs to change, because it feels like a sham once you actually do anything yourself.

snowwrestler 1y ago

It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave. Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

cogman10 1y ago
It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people. Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video. Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular. If you don't have a huge viewership or dynamic content then yeah, it's actually pretty easy to setup and run videos sites (infowars has managed it). Target h264 and aac audio with a set number of resolutions and bitrates and viola, you've got something that's pretty competitive on the cheap that can play on pretty much any device. It's not optimal for bandwidth, for that you need to start sniffing client capabilities. However, it'll get the job done while being pretty much universally playable.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Thing with Infowars is, they got a lot of rich people and probably Russia paying the bills. Video hosting still is damn expensive if you are not one of the top dogs.
- lucb1e 1y ago
  > apply high quality compression on videos that become popular Do they put a different amount of compression effort in if the video isn't (expected to become) popular?
  - cogman10 1y ago
    I don't know what the Youtube compression queue looks like. I'd not be shocked if they do more aggressive compression for well known creators. For nobodies (like myself) the compression is very basic. Whatever I send ends up compressed with VP9 which, I believe, youtube has a bunch of hardware that can do that really fast.