← Back to context

Comment by jacobgkau

2 months 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.

15 comments

jacobgkau

Reply
lelandbatey  2 months 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/

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  2 months 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.

    • Karrot_Kream  2 months ago

      No lol nobody is reading the numbers. Vimeo is $20 / mo. Vimeo + $5 Linode server = $25 / mo, cheaper than the $30 / mo OVH server. The quoted ScaleEngine is $25 / mo, which ($25 + $5 = $30) the same as the OVH server.

      Y'all just have two different budgets. For one person $30 / mo is reasonable for the other it's expensive.

      But the core claim, that $5 / mo hosts a lot of non-video content but not much video content, holds.

      2 replies →

    • cocogoatmain  2 months 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

      1 reply →

  • MonaroVXR  2 months ago

    I'm on mobile, but what player did you use on your website?

    Does it handle buffer?

privatelypublic  2 months ago

Doesn't cloudflare and amazon have this now? Pretty sure CF is developing a closed source player- but theres plenty of FOSS ones (rip the one jellyfin uses out of it- at worst).

And, theres plenty of tutorials on using ffmpeg based tools to make the files. And yes, "oh no, I need to learn something new for my video workflow."

  • jacobgkau  2 months ago

    > And yes, "oh no, I need to learn something new for my video workflow."

    That's rude and uncalled for. I didn't say I was unwilling to learn something new. I said the economics don't work out for the solution someone else proposed. And I also disputed the statement, "we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page." Now you've moved the goalpost to "learn something new" (which actually means "design and deploy an entire new system").

killingtime74  2 months ago

Just use CloudFlare R2 object storage with free bandwidth. It's specifically cleared for use as a video hoster.