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Ask HN: Anyone hosting their own videos?

37 points| worldofmatthew | 3 years ago | reply

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.

62 comments

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[+] gyulai|3 years ago|reply
My 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|3 years ago|reply
This 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.
[+] Apreche|3 years ago|reply
Do 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!

[+] lbriner|3 years ago|reply
> Get ready for a nice bandwidth bill if anyone actually watches your videos!

This 100%

I looked into it before and understandably, the badnwidth you can be using up for a relatively small amount of videos is always going to be pretty expensive. It is also not always easy to know in-advance, and do you want to suddenly get a 10x bill or have to cut-off your users when it gets expensive?

If you can afford to charge, then obviously it's different, otherwise YouTube's annoying advertising is paying for you...

[+] dylan604|3 years ago|reply
1) Okay, but...

2) Why? There are plenty of blogs walking you through how to use FFMPEG to generate multibitrate HLS packages. I get faster than realtime encoding making 5 different bitrates.

2->1) Now you're only storing the highly compressed versions instead of the original (at whatever compression chosen for that)

[+] i_like_robots|3 years ago|reply
This is how we did it at the FT. We looked at on demand HLS or DASH via our CDN as well but this didn't become a requirement during my time there.
[+] readingnews|3 years ago|reply
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.

[+] KronisLV|3 years ago|reply
Currently 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/

PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/

[+] PaywallBuster|3 years ago|reply
Haven'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!

[+] dewey|3 years ago|reply
Is 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|3 years ago|reply
This. 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.

[+] viraptor|3 years ago|reply
There'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|3 years ago|reply
Installing 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|3 years ago|reply
Peertube is often very hard to load within MPV and you are exposing all of the visitors IPs to each other.
[+] Ayesh|3 years ago|reply
I 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|3 years ago|reply
>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.

[+] jeena|3 years ago|reply
Hi, yes, I'm doing it on 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
[+] santiagobasulto|3 years ago|reply
I 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.

[+] phantomathkg|3 years ago|reply
Upload 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.

[+] than3|3 years ago|reply
AFAIK, 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).

[+] throwaway2016a|3 years ago|reply
I 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|3 years ago|reply
> 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/Develope...

[+] guptaneil|3 years ago|reply
If 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/

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.

[+] kkfx|3 years ago|reply
Mh, 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...

[+] seper8|3 years ago|reply
I use Azure Storage + BunnyCDN...

Pretty cheap/easy.

[+] worldofmatthew|3 years ago|reply
Just make sure to use the "volume" network as its much cheaper and latency matters far less for video.
[+] hollywood_court|3 years ago|reply
I’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

[+] nxbp|3 years ago|reply
Just have to nitpick: videos. Plurals don't have an apostrophe.
[+] Tepix|3 years ago|reply
OP 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.

[+] videohoster|3 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] 411111111111111|3 years ago|reply
Not 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.