Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
Surely, this piece of the pie is not as big as many had hoped for, but there’s definitely more than a 1000 companies that think their video content is worth a better platform than YouTube or Facebook, however they define “better”.
What’s the deal with ‘lossless compression’? I feel like they use the term very differently from how the industry uses it.
Multiple resolutions, adaptive bitrates, dynamic packaging for different versions of HLS/DASH/Smooth are pretty much a must-have for any video solution these days, free or paid.
It’s amusing to hear an argument that CDNs are hampering adoption of better video compression from a CDN company. However, while Akamai surely would love to bill for more bytes per minute of video, no one is asking them. They just distribute whatever and however many bytes origin server has for them (give or take some convenience features around it).
CDNs are scrambling to provide compelling features to increase stickiness, usually with limited success when it comes to video. Bandwidth-heavy customers do want to take advantage of rapidly commoditising technology and falling prices and are pushing for multi-CDN strategy.
Using correct terminology and customising stock Bitdash player would have helped at the start of such ambitious endeavour. Good luck to CloudFlare and congrats to Bitmovin.
Edit: And a related question: would Cloudflare Stream work without the JS player using a regular video-tag?
Depends on the browser. This is the primary reason why people actually use a JS player that wraps around video tag. The other reasons are to accommodate business logic (i. e. overlay on top of the video, pre-roll, thumbnail, etc.) and better UX.
But yeah, JS players make life a whole lot easier by providing a single API for customisation, handling media source extensions and a bunch of other stuff.
Thanks, I contemplated whether I should disclose it, but given that I have currently have no stakes in the game, decided it's unnecessary.
The primary use case for CDN is latency reduction for serving small files (CSS, JS, images) and such traffic has different characteristic and requires different optimizations than high-throughput traffic. I worry how long large files are going to be cached by CDN PoPs. PoPs can't certainly cache everything forever and they can be more eager to remove large files and in such case CDN will be reducing performance by adding an additional HTTP level hop to the origin server (and likely a few IP level hops). My other worry is that PoPs can deploy DoS detection heuristic that are tuned for standard web pages and a bandwidth intensive page may trigger the rules and have the traffic throttled. Such throttling is something that I've occasionally observed while testing CloudFlare with large files, but I'm not sure what was the cause, CloudFlare monitoring tools did not report anything unusual.
Check out cachefly.com for instance.
Other CDNs charge for bandwidth so why would they offer their customers an easy to use 'optimize images' feature, it'll just lose them money. Cloudflare can offer it because making your images smaller saves them money.
This will be an interesting option for anyone who publishes videos but speed, integration complexity and pricing are going to be key.
What if the content is just generally in "bad taste" and not overtly Neo-Nazi, will CF feel the need to play "Content Cop" or are they willing to abide by their role as utility?
I know many YT firearms channels that have been basically blacklisted from monetization in recent months because YT classifies anything they do as "unsuitable for ads". It has forced a lot to double publish to https://www.full30.com/ to monetize their work.
Using your example, a firearms video stream could stream videos through Cloudflare Stream and sell ads themselves or partner with an ad network that was willing to sell them to an audience that cared about firearms. I totally agree that the one-size-fits-all solution of Facebook or YouTube reverts to the lowest common denominator and, in doing so, will inherently not be right for every publisher.
Whatever algorithm YT changed a few months ago is really putting a hurt on content creators for little gain. If certain advertisers don't want to be on channels with certain keywords they should be able to configure that, but wholesale demonetization is really stupid.
Yes, that's it!
The reality is of course somewhere in the middle, and there's some content which some advertisers would not want to be associated with, while others might actually want to target, and the current algorithm may not be serving these needs well. Hopefully it's just a matter of a better system being needed that might come later.
Interestingly, which topic was covered recently in Mozilla's IRL podcast[1].
The rhetoric of today and with people framing their opponents as the vilest people on earth, I just have a tough time with anything but absolutes on infrastructure decisions.
Of course, proper legal authority within their proper jurisdiction must be respected. I might disagree with a couple of court decisions, but a business needs to deal properly with those and I would never fault a business for that.
I would have hoped that their answer to impulsive decisions would be 'checks and balances' to prevent it from happening again.
Admittedly the stance for/against Tor discrimination is a wide one.... That's an issue with users, not content.
But the only case where I believed he nuked a site was against Daily Stormer. They call for violence and eradication of all non-whites, specializing on Jewish and African hatred.
He wont even kick off booters, which even he admits are fraud artists even when they do pay. That's because their frontend and backends are different. Technically this service is legal, and only illegal if used as a weapon (intent). Therefore, Eastdakota wont act. [Hopefully I best paraphrased his views...]
So yeah, I would consider your site to be safe, unless you call for extermination of $race and actions to back that up.
I more worried about someone telling Cloudflare I'm doing that or some other vile thing when I am not. It seems to be the standard way to get YouTube and Twitter to kick people off.
Trust is easy to lose and hard to gain.
There is a huge gap between “conservative bent” and those trying to actively incite violence in the name of Hitler. And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across all their hosted properties is hardly an indication that their CEO is randomly moody. A single data point is not a trend.
If you read the blog[1] regarding that incident, it provides a lot more evidence than the datapoint of the removal. It also completely undermines Cloudflare's claims of being content-neutral. Given that content neutrality is a binary state...
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Also hosted by cloudflare: ISIS sites, which are a lot more of a clear and present danger to real people than a bunch of racists. That means the standard has gone from content neutrality - to content neutrality so long as you don't imply things the CEO doesn't like. I.e. not neutral.
From the blog:
>And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like.
Anything I can say about this will be ridiculously snarky, but this is the hill you chose to sacrifice your principles on, Matthew? Really?
I agree they should remove ISIS sites. It’s marginally harder given you could argue it’s about religion/politics, but I’m happy to lump them in with neo-nazis inciting violence.
It’d be nice if you could create some perfect set of clear rules that you could cleanly apply to 100% of sites. Unfortunately the world is squishy and gray, which is why we have judges despite countless laws written in legalese that build on top of each other’s precedent. I don’t expect judging content to be the same. I appreciate the CEO thinking they should just defer to when gov forces them to shut something down. I also appreciate the perspective of removing extremist sites — you got one life to live so why not make a difference creating barriers to _EXTREME_ hate/violence around the world.
Seems an easy choice.
" I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet."
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
The point of the matter is services can host questionable content and remove it to comply with the law or services can based on their terms of service remove content "as they see fit."
The question remains, when will a service come for your content? I'm not advocating for hate speech or any illegal activities, I just think cloudflare strapped on their skis and are now on their way down the classic slippery slope.
Voat was targeting with a letter writing campaign saying they were a child porn host when they weren't. All the liberals said "if you don't like Reddit, make your own." So someone did. And then liberals DDoS'd it into the ground and had any ISP that dared host them, filled with DMCA and child porn notifications.
Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have all worked against anyone who dares question the status quo. Not "nazis", normal people. But surely the creator of Dilbert is a threat to the nation and worthy of retribution, right?
I guess you guys are only for regulation and fairness when it suits your cause...
Bucketing half the population together is intellectually dishonest and does nothing to solve any problems or convince others of your points. Labeling them the enemy only creates further divisions for division sake. All it does is give fodder to those wanting confirmation bias on a given side.
You should get your news from somewhere better than Breitbart. That’s not only transparently untrue – try spending 30 seconds watching the stream without seeing someone question the status quo – but comically so given the number of people complaining with cause that those services aren’t shutting down abusive users. I mean, Facebook and Twitter notoriously say that death and rape threats don’t violate their community standards until it gets widespread attention, and you think your unsourced assertion that simply asking questions gets anyone banned?
They have no issue providing service to ISIS: https://www.theepochtimes.com/anti-terrorist-hacker-group-re...
The CEO literally said it was because he felt like terminating DailyStormer. Why is it suddenly wrong to repeat his own words?
Instead you make it sound like this is about the content, something cloudflare clearly doesn't have an issue with.
Do you have a quote where the CEO says this? Your statement gives the impression that this was nothing more than a whim. As I pointed out below, according to their own statement on the matter, that's not the case:
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
I've provided the link I have for two reasons:
* it's a link I know about that's relevant to the discussion
* it is from Cloudflare themselves, so the chance of it being a misquote (accidental or otherwise) is less likely. I don't have a knee-jerk instinct to reject official statements as issued in bad faith without other evidence.
I repeatedly linked likely for the same reason you have: I saw something I thought was misrepresentative or misinformed more than once.
I'm thankful for the link because I can use that to alter my understanding of the event. There's a quote that's sometimes attributed to Keynes "When the facts change, I change my mind."[0] That's something I endeavor to do.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/
I'll also admit to a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the use of a throwaway account in a contentious discussion. I can understand the use of throwaways to protect identity, but in that case the standard should be higher: they should really be bringing something substantial to the discussion, not just repeating talking points.
Thanks again for the link. That's useful.
Cloudflare can't be trusted anymore. If they want to say they have actual standards and rules that operate on (and shut down nazi sites based on those rules) that's fine.
publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or downplays an act committed under the rule of National Socialism .. publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a manner that violates the dignity of the victims by approving of, glorifying, or justifying National Socialist rule of arbitrary force
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...
Edit: I'll take that downvote as a sign of "I casually claim censorship can be limited while doing nothing to stop its expansion."
A recent example of what appears to be a moderate, democrat voting professor experiencing it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4546704/Professor-ca...
No there isn't. That's like saying there is an increased trend among conservatives in general towards being Nazis.
There is an increase in the activity of the lunatic fringes on both sides. Ranging from hardcore tea party people to "OMG white people are the worst" morons all the way to antifa and neo-nazis.
Someone compared the election manifesto from the British National Party (who are basically neo-Nazi) for the 2005 UK election, and the 2017 manifesto from the Conservative party, the main centre-right party in the UK.
And there were an awful lot of similarities which the Conservatives wouldn't have put in before.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2017/04/23/compared-tories-polic...
If you're not British you might think "oh they are just another political party", that's not true at all.
Secondly there is nothing in that article about neo-Nazism, so I don't know why you brought it up? I'm talking about neo-Nazi sites, not general racism/etc.
--- ¹ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/902581a0-99ff-11e7-b83c-9588e5148...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/education/edlife/internet...
[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/student-protestors-and-t...
It doesn't offend me. It's just not a reliable source.
And those links don't address my second point. There is no reference to neo-Nazism. I'm suggesting neo-Nazi website be taken offline/
Is loss of human life an acceptable cost for free speech?
Tech companies didn't choose to be the society police, yet here we are.
We just witnessed something very significant, when Russia interfered. They had an express goal and they carried it out with technologies we know.
A medium that is absolutely free of censorship is not in your best interest, because it can and will be used to compromise you.
The solutions are difficult, but what is clear (especially to folks who have had to moderate even a small channel or forum) is that a policy of no-censorship never scales in the real world, the question is how you do it, where to draw the line, etc..
https://www.theepochtimes.com/anti-terrorist-hacker-group-re...
Cloudflare was quite clear on the criteria they used.
> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
You can disagree with that criteria, and you can question whether this is the true criteria Cloudflare used. For the later, you need to provide evidence in opposition to this case.
“Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision.“
https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
Name one person harmed by the site?
If you have ever seen a page of DailyStormer, you'd either laugh or go away.
No one has ever killed anyone after reading a few paragraphs on that site.
Putting in the argument of "Is loss of human life an acceptable cost for free speech" is not an honest way of describing censorship of content that is silly at its worst and dumb at its best.
Clearly it’s the nazis who are out of control and we need to take down their websites. Freedom of speech be damned!
Seriously. This was a harmless, stupid, non-violent demo for nazis to out themselves in, before the antifa turned up and got people killed.
Are their websites being taken down? No? How come?
Disclaimer: think nazis are about as stupid as it gets.
Edit: not exactly expecting upvotes for this post, but this thread clearly needs some balance.
These are the guys who rushed a non-violent demo. These are the people you are defending: https://mobile.twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/90191505521...
It doesn't. Seriously, you're making excuses for a murderous white supremacist asshole.
Just because one has freedom of speech does not mean one is free of consequence. So actual murderers should be punished. People believe what they choose to believe, and if it's not the DailyStormer it's some other hate mongering source (that's not exclusive to the internet).
lots of people would say yes.
Yes, this decision has already been made. Freedom (of speech and more) is fought for and won through struggle and sacrifice. We have already lost much human life to defend these rights and continue to do so.
Bad actions will be dealt with the appropriate consequences, as they always have, but that does not mean we should start limiting rights. This is the foundation of the justice system and society itself.
The nazis are shit too, no doubt, but it’s hard not to blame the antifa for the ultimate outcome.
Also worth remembering: the nazis were using their legal right to free speech in a legal demonstration. The antifas were illegally and violently obstructing it.
Don’t be too quick to pick sides.
>are they willing to abide by their role as utility?
I can remember when the conservative position was to support freedom of association, and to oppose regulating private businesses as utilities.
I can remember that as recently as this year, in the debate over net neutrality.
I know a few online businesses that don't use YouTube because they operate in a grey area in terms of fair use on videos (videogame footage) and they don't want to build their video business on YT because of their "trust the claimant over the content producer" and 3-strikes approach to DMCA claims.
Obviously if customers are paying Cloudflare to host their videos, I would assume the dispute process would be less one-sided, but have they said anything about this yet?
On top of that, I suspect there's no "3 strikes" rule, either. A cache is a cache. Entries in the cache expire for a lot of reasons, including legal ones. Lots of cache expiration has no impact on ongoing caching of new data.
- will Cloudfare require a legal DMCA takedown notice in order to take down content, or will they allow 'trusted' partners such as large companies to simply assert a violation?
- will Cloudfare employ any sort of automated copyright screening algorithms, like ContentID, that automatically prevent sharing of some content?
- when served with a DMCA takedown, will Cloudfare immediately take down the content (presumption of guilt) or will they allow the content-provider time to respond, either to contest the takedown or take responsibility?
- will Cloudfare push back against or provide consequences for filing fradulent DMCA takedowns?
On receiving a DMCA takedown notice they have to remove access to the content. Them's the rules of the DMCA. You can then file a counter claim if the notice is mistaken or fraudulent or you have the required permissions. The next step for the claimant is then to either remove their claim and allow your content to be restored or sue you. The DMCA also requires repeat infringers be banned from the service. In this case I imagine that means your account, not singular website, gets banned.
If they don't do that then Cloudflare loses their safe harbor status and would be liable for the content you upload.
While possibly controversial to say, the way YouTube handles copyright claims is actually far easier and much safer (legally) on the end user.
You should always seriously consider the repercussions if you're going to have a site that handles user-uploaded content. Primarily make it as easy as possible for your service to receive the initial DMCA takedown notice rather than force the claimant to go to Cloudflare directly.
For a similar process check out how GitHub handles DMCA claims: https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/
>So, will Cloudflare have the same kind of DMCA and/or ContentID controls that YouTube has? How will they police the content they stream for their clients/partners?
There are penalties for false DMCA claims, so allowing companies to bypass a real DMCA claim lets them shirk a lot of work (and responsibility) for making sure those claims are correct, lest they incur legal or financial penalties.
When someone copyright claims your video, they're not actually sending a DMCA, they're doing a YT-specific process that just happens to look sorta like the DMCA notice/counternotice process without involving the legal system.
How they deliver the video is pretty innovative:
> How we accomplish this is by dynamically assigning data centers IP ranges based on which are currently being underutilized. Then videos are loaded alongside a manifest file, pointing the player to where they can locate the different chunks of the video for each bitrate. (As we described earlier, this is how adaptive streaming works: the player uses this manifest file to quickly locate different bitrate formats and switch between them as network latency changes). That manifest file is dynamically generated to point to the closest data center using Cloudflare’s default Anycast IP for the first chunk, then to the underutilized data centers for subsequent chunks. The final result is that the first segment is fast, with low cost subsequent segments. This allows us to offer a video solution that is at the best price, because let's face it, enabling video today is really expensive and unpredictable and it doesn't have to be.
Dynamic Manifest generation has been done for years, first by Unified Streaming, now by most companies.
The pricing of the infrastructure has the potential to literally poison a product.
Youtube is free. Sidenote, I am still interested in this product.
So the statement that "the video streaming market is screwed up" is based on the fact that Cloudflare themselves only have 1K customers doing a meaningful level of streaming?
You might want to talk to Akami, Amazon, Edgecast and Fastly. I'm sure they will tell you the video streaming market is quite healthy.
Do you really believe that all statements made by CEOs should be accepted without question?
What motivation does he have to lie about this particular number? His track record on honesty to date is good and the company is forthright in its dealings, from what I have seen. This isn't one of the google or microsoft boys trying to sell you on some shite AI in return for a high def feed from you eyes 24/7.
I've simply grown tired of the perpetual Cloudflare marketing machine and the lack of citation of the figures they throw around in these regular marketing posts.
While I'm not the biggest Cloudflare fan I definitely welcome this move.
There are plenty of places for video, but I am not so sure we need more of it. I'd say the tendency to put more content into video format is an overall negative trend.
The fact is, the only platform for video, right now, which can work is youtube. If you host your own video instead, it both has a high cost, and low rate of returns.
If cloudflare can make hosting your own video more cost effective, it is a plus for the internet. I don't want youtube to be so dominant that they can start doing things like censoring and curating.
They're saying that they can make it easy / viable / cheap enough that 100x more self-hosted video providers could exist.
Emphasis mine.
That's exactly what it looks like to me, more so when I look at it in context with the rest of the comment they made?
It's very clear that he's counting companies using the CDNs to distribute video content. What would the 1,000 figure refer to otherwise?
With no indication for what "meaningful and interesting scale" actually means. I even asked what the criteria was for "meaningful and interesting scale" was. I received no "meaningful or interesting" response. However I was downvoted several times.
Maybe someone has vested invested in online video content?
It really is a horrible way to communicate most of the time. It has uses, don't get me wrong. I don't see it having 100,000 useful uses, however. Every news site will be nothing but a text blurb and a video, it'll be video all the way down. It's a horrible idea.
Video is, except for a few areas, a horrible way to impart information. The only 'good' thing about video is that you can embed unskippable ads.
How Edisonian of you: http://ethw.org/Phonograph (TL;DR: Edison meant it for business but it boomed for entertainment).
> It's a pretty horrible way to share information, in all but a few situations.
Those few situations are probably 80% of internet traffic :)
> That's what communication is. Even a movie is sharing information. Even a music video is sharing information. The whole Internet is sharing information. Some of it has less value than the rest, but it is still information.
Technically true, practically meaningless. If I want to see Star Wars I probably want a nice 4k video, not the ASCII 80x20 version of it.
I happen to work directly in this space and I want to know if you think my traffic numbers are meaningful.
https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/yc-backed-tapin-tv-evolves...
Sadly, it didn't work out for a number of reasons, largely unrelated to the actual idea. I'm glad someone else is finally working on it.
Why would you want to losslessly compress audio or video? The resulting files would be huge--often too huge to steam. Lossy compression is what you want.
I must be misunderstanding the article?
- your product is explicitly lossless as a feature (like Tidal for streaming lossless music)
- you have to provide the files to others for reasons other than watching or listening (like editing), where integrity matters, and the use case/context requires a stream instead of just a file download
1920x1080 at 3 bytes per pixel and 30 frames per second is 11GB for just one minute of video, and 186MB per second. That's far too big and expensive to stream, and outside of somewhat special circumstances I've never heard of anyone storing video in such a huge format.
That's a slightly odd way to phrase it, and I'm amazed that it's not a basic part of any streaming service these days, but makes more sense to me than the other suggestions.
For instance, the user might upload an H.264 video as an MP4 file. Streaming services generally won't serve the MP4 file itself, but will create an HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) version where the video is split into multiple .ts chunks along with a .m3u8 playlist.
However, such services (including YouTube) will generally re-encode the video when doing so, and the end result will have poorer quality than the original uploaded file.
This is actually unnecessary because .ts files support the H.264 codec, so the video does not need to be re-encoded. Instead the streams can be copied to retain their original quality.
If additional compression is necessary, I suppose it would be possible to apply HTTP compression using algorithms such as gzip or deflate.
Of course, this is purely speculation. It would be nice if Cloudflare clarified what they meant. But it would certainly be great if they used stream copying where possible instead of re-encoding.
YouTube is, essentially, free. Even if I don't want to use them as a host, I can upload a video and a few minutes later download it in DASH and a variety of older formats - again, for free.
If I do use them, I might get a few quid of advertising revenue.
CloudFlare video lets me keep people on my site (damn those distracting cat videos) and possibly gives me a branded player. That's nice - but is the cost of use (per minute transcoding) going to be worth it?
If YouTube is the home tape deck of video streaming and Netflix/Amazon are the major record labels, cloudflare would provide record pressing and distribution services to indie labels. (Do millennials even understand those terms?) The ideal customer would probably be a smaller Disney competitor who wants to try their luck at selling directly but understands very well that they can't hire a team of engineers matching that at Netflix.
A system like this will make it easier to create Youtube competitors, so when youtube screws over a part of their producers / consumers they have somewhere viable to turn to.
I'm not in a position to explore a need for Cloudflare outside of hiding my origin IP addresses, but for those of you who are, are you actually using and benefiting from the wide array of offerings from Cloudflare? As it stands now, I see these announcements and make a mental note to expect a slough of marketing emails in my inbox for the next couple weeks.
I may be wrong but I think eugeneionesco is referencing instant DNS changes which come as a benefit of using Cloudflare and other large DNS management companies. I've never personally seen a registrar offer anything like that.
DNS is "just" a globally distributed, eventually consistent, key:value store, with a ton of caching built into it.
Also, while it may look instant to you, it may not be to your customers / users / other internet people.
Look at it / try it.
As a reformed Akamai DNS customer it is like time travel :D
Thats not DNS, that is global load balancing.
Try using something other than HTTP over that FQDN.
Its not your cache that is the issue.
People have miss behaving caches, that do not always respect TTLs, some apps can cache the DNS response (I remember a Java issue where the initial value found was cached for the lifetime of the process!).
What happens is:
#1 - Application (browser, chat client, etc) gets FQDN. It checks if it has the recordset in its cache, and if the TTL is expired.
#2 - Application asks the OS for the recordset. The OS checks its cache, and TTL expiry.
#3 - OS asks the configured local DNS resolvers for the recordset. They check their cache, and TTL expiry.
#4 - These resolvers ask the configured upstream resolvers (e.g. ISP for most home users). They check their cache, and TTL expiry. (This step can repeat, depending on how networks are configured. E.G. ISPs may have DNS resolvers per city, which ask central servers)
#5 - If all of those previous steps fail (the recordset is not cached, or the TTL is expired) the last resolver in the chain will ask the root for the NS records of the zone, which will get fresh records from CloudFlare.
Remember - any of these recursive DNS servers could have an override to cache the recordset for longer than the publicly defined TTL. This is not as much of an issue anymore, but it used to be a massive one.
And this is before applications decide that they know better. - see http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/net/pr... (networkaddress.cache.ttl section)
What exactly if your function at CloudFlare Jake? Pondering if this is more marketing then technical/service function. Any chance you are in charge of social media and forum posts about CF?
I like the simple easy to use interface and the fact that all the domains that I manage are there, no need to login to multiple registrars.
Linked from this page: https://www.cloudflare.com/performance/
For instance try zip'ing a WAV file and compare it to the same file encoded in FLAC. Typically FLAC will achieve better compression while still being lossless.
There are lossless video codecs, like VC-2 for instance. It's not very common in the consumer world however because people generally don't want to stream or store high definition video with a single digit compression factor (that single digit being generally around 2).
Of course lossless compression is typically a lot less compact than lossy alternatives (the article mentions a 1/2 compression ration, which is not much compared to lossy video codecs) but it means you're not degrading your video at all, you just have additional processing.
Note that some algorithms these days claim to be "visually lossless" which is mainly a marketing gimmick which means that it's lossy but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference with the naked eye in normal conditions (TICO claims that for instance).
An easy but somewhat crude comparison would be a text file that reads:
“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Lossless would be putting that content into a ZIP file (eg winzip / 7zip / etc).
Where as lossy would be rewriting the passage to something like:
“Space is really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Generally lossy compression will yield better compression because you can vastly reduce the information you need to compress and then apply lossless techniques as well.
In ffmpeg, -qp 0 will get you lossless x264. I use it all the time (via OBS) to losslessly record my screen.
> know what a megabit per second or H.264 are.
Yes, yes he should
eastdakota: "We plan to support live streaming. We're gathering data on how people would prefer to do streaming. As soon as we figure out the best way to support the greatest number of use cases we'll add it to live to Stream."
Definitely really interested to know what they are thinking of doing. Potentially a customer if they do it right and much cheaper than the competition!
One of the challenges with video delivery and where sites like YouTube can't work is if your business relies on providing videos to paid or logged-in members only.
Patreon creators get around this in a kludgy way by using unlisted YT videos (which can still be shared by rogue patrons) but that's not ideal.
But if you want to control access to a stream based on some custom business logic in your application, you're currently stuck serving your own video or using one of the existing combination of encoder/server/player that their post alludes to.
Pretty hefty work involved in getting it reliable, would be nice for a "drop in" solution.
Its good to see video encoding/storage/delivery maturing; the more players in the space, the more options one has to choose from if a provider prefers to not host your content (whether that's because of a ToS violation, or because the company CEO just doesn't want to host your content). "Drop in" solutions give your provider a great deal of control over your fate, which is okay, until its not.
With Patreon raising a large round ($60MM) of financing [2], I'd expect them to build out their own streaming system based on S3, an encoding engine, and a CDN, versus be under the control of a turnkey provider (a la Reddit having to move off of Imgur).
[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...
I feel like video hosting/streaming is part of their Patron's businesses, not theirs. They just manage the subscriptions.
If I was an investor in Patreon, I would not want them spending my money building out a proprietary video hosting platform.
Because a fair number of Patreoneers (this really needs a better name) have private videos for patrons and, if hosted by Patreon, they can do a much better job of keeping them private than, say, making the Patreoneers use YouTube with a private link and hoping no-one leaks it.
It probably also wouldn't be that expensive. Their videos would mostly be behind paywalls. It's not like YouTube or Reddit Videos where they could get a million views overnight. So the delivery cost would be naturally constrained.
YouTube apparently blocking links to Patreon (and others) on videos unless they're monetised.
"Here's a fun wrinkle: if your channel doesn't have at least 10,000 total views, you can't monetize at all. Small channels with dedicated Patreon supporters are F'd."
Imagine just dropping a tag like this onto your page:
<display-ad width="300" height="250">
Meanwhile even Google has to crawl your Adsense pages to know what sort of content to serve. And they have to worry about things like websites serving different content to GoogleBot. Some interesting possibilities when you're proxying all of a website's traffic.
Even if Adsense let you render ads server-side by proxying user info to them, that's a lot more work for every website owner compared to what CloudFlare could enable since it already is the proxy.
Or imagine CloudFlare encoding live-auctioned ads directly into your videos on demand as part of the video stream itself.
As a cloudflare customer and an everyday internet I am thankful cloudflare hasn't gone in this direction.
Edit: Seriously, -1's and an accusation of supporting pedophilia? I've certainly hit on a raw topic. And frankly, I'm not wrong regarding Captcha hell. We've had dozens of articles and threads about that very topic.
Because of that, I primarily run those transits, and I tend to get captcha hell still. I'd be willing to debug on my end.
Which Tor Browser version do you have?
For a short while, it was significantly better. It probably lasted for 3-5 weeks, and then things fairly quickly progressed back to their usual, namely being captcha hell.
(Request first page, do captcha, click on next link, do another captcha, go back to first page, do captcha... wash rinse repeat.)
Edit: Also the event you described happened much earlier than when the drop of Cloudflare captchas happened, which was around if I remember correctly when Google announced "invisible captchas".
Well, it's not.
> The problem is that Cloudflare blocks Tor, not Tor Browser: not every Tor user uses Tor Browser.
Except the advice is, even when it does block Tor Browser, as they say it doesnt, the answer is to use Caching services.
The problem here is, it's now taboo to call these issues out. My posts' scores are -3, -1, and 1... I highlight this because it hid my main post. And alas, "-1" is used to silence legit grievances.
Well then they did a favor to you and you should thank them, if you're using Tor without the Tor Browser chances are big that you're screwed by your fingerprint and lack of first party isolation and stream isolation, see the 2nd last paragraph here for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14583699
Cloudflare still has a long way to go in terms of being nice to humans.
And better - if a service that started by using this got large enough, they could spin out on their own with no ties to the original platform.
Though of course CloudFlare protects booters as well, but I'm willing to buy their philosophical argument.
Imagine a world where all ISPs didn't let you spoof IP address. And, controversially, one where ISP customers had to pay for their SmartToaster's outbound DoS.