Hacker News Reader

Comment by foxhop | Hacker News Reader

I'm pissed, I knew this was coming. Google and "Alphabet" are bastards.

Will this be my last video hosted on YouTube?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUYrN0o-cfk | Hardneck Garlic Planted For High Yield.

YouTube doesn't give me any network effect anyways (all my views are from external sources), I was just trying to do good in the world.

What tech should I look at for self hosted streaming on Digital Ocean spaces and a CDN? Please give me hints as to what I should do from a self-hosted perspective. I'm going to "DevOps" a solution, using webservers just like I do for many of my web domains. Where do I start, I want to build it from scratch using open source.

ideas?

I already have the domain unturf.com

View on HN

For the server itself, a lot of people use providers with cheap bandwidth like OVH and Hetzner. Digital ocean is great but it's still bill by your bandwidth usage, probably not ideal to host video contents that can rack up a lot of bandwidth usage.

As for the application itself, just use ffmpeg to convert hls/dash and just dump it behind nginx, no need for fancy stuff imo.

Cloudflare stream is also a relatively cheap alternative to host your video if you do a lot of video embedding on your site. I heard that some school networks block it, but other than that it's been working great and I've been using for one of my client to host their private lecture videos.

Vimeo is also a great alternative and relatively cheap too. My only gripes is it's blocked in certain countries, but otherwise it's fine if you don't care to serve visitors from those countries.

Check out PeerTube. It may be exactly what you're looking for.

Naw, PeerTube is clunky and I don't think I need the network effect. I want to host videos (for download or streaming) like I host static web pages.

Hmm. AlternativeTo has a list[0]. Not a great list, but a list.

Looking at that, possibly MediaGoblin could work.

Alternately, something like Jellyfin may work, but that's a little bit of a push.

[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/?platform=self-ho...

How about vimeo?

Why not just put the mp4 with every other static file and wrap it in a <video> tag on the page you want to embed it in?

I've done this before for a single video, was wondering if there was a better approach but this is likely what I will do, at a minimum for clients without Javascript.

You could do something like what N-O-D-E.net does. Although I couldn't find a video on their setup, I've heard the administrator is active on their IRC channel, or you could email them at mail at n-o-d-e.net if you wanted to ask.

https://n-o-d-e.net/

https://n-o-d-e.net/node_mini_server3.html

Thanks mate, I'll check this out, I also use IRC so that's always the most fun way to reach out.

> I'm pissed, I knew this was coming. Google and "Alphabet" are bastards.

Yeah, how dare they charge for storage, CPU encoding and bandwidth costs!

Anyway, you can deploy nginx with RTMP module on any server and host videos yourself. We did this for many video providers (which then moved on to YT because it turns out hosting costs money), but it's not that hard.

They are not charging me for storage, they are putting ads on my videos with no way to opt-out. Ads of the like that I have _NO_ desire to be affiliated with, ads for pollutants like "weed killers" and "insecticides".

I don't care if they use fancy algorithms for transcoding (CPU cycles) or bandwidth costs, or storage, that was the deal. I ship to them and they host it without ads. I did this for the "promise" of networking effect but this is a lie, the algorithm hates me.

I will foot the bill for my own hosting, f them.

Does this seem like a decent guide?

https://www.nginx.com/blog/video-streaming-for-remote-learni...

You can use ffmpeg to convert your video to HLS/Dash format and host it behind your run-of-the-mill nginx webserver as static contents. Then on your webpages, just use hls.js [0] to embed those uploaded videos in a webpages. hls.js will handle adaptive bitrate automatically, so the videos should load pretty fast for your visitor, though probably not as fast as youtube since they have edge servers everywhere, but still a lot faster than just hosting an .mp4 file and load it via <video> tag.

You don't need fancy plugins or webservers just to serve adaptive bitrate anymore these days as HLS/Dash provides many benefits of RTMP without the complexity cost. You only need to worry about bandwidth / cdn cost, and the cheapest bandwidth can be bought via hosting providers like hetzner and ovh.

[0] https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/

Thanks, I think I'll do a combination of this with a fallback to downloadable MP4 and inline video tags for clients without Javascript.

You say to convert to HLS/Dash, does hls.js support both? Pros cons of one other the other? Make sense to do both?

HLS seem to be the more popular format these days and browsers seem to start supporting it natively. I said hls/dash because both formats offers mostly the same benefit compared to just simply embedding mp4 files directly. You can use hls.js for hls and dash.js for dash, or video.js for both.

Thank you very much!

https://lbry.tv/

Tried it a few years back and last week, both times my video loads and then stops buffering after like 10 seconds. I'm likely doing something wrong but, do I need a dedicated server to seed my content?

Otherwise it seems busted.

Question: Is Linode Bucket a viable option for video file hosting?

I don't know but I also use linode so that is an option if you find out.

For a looks of it one can take a risk and make S3 storage for video.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com