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Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Do you contribute to the Internet Archive? Video service is ridiculously expensive, and using them to hotlink HTML5 video onto your Web site seems...kinda antithetical to the spirit of what you're saying.

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This is true but I think OP meant Internet Archive in addition to self hosting.

> use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube

Use IA to set up a canonical, permanent URL for the media, which resolves to a host under your control as long as it's available, then resolves to the IA-hosted archived copy if your site ever disappears? As long as the URL doesn't change, a CDN could do most of the heavy lifting anyway, right?

No, OP meant embedding Archive hosted assets onto your site, or any site.

> You can use [the Internet Archive URL] in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage

There's nothing special about "video service" nor is that even a relevant concept to discuss and in no way contradicts anything I said. If you're going to claim otherwise, please be specific about this alleged contradiction so we can have a meaningful conversation. Serving data is serving data. Hosters have to put effort into disguising/obfuscating a URL to make it not be a static link (and thus completely useful for HTML5 video/audio use, or pointing others to download and keep, or something else).

If a hoster doesn't want one to distribute the files, that is the issue. Not whether one distributes them for use in an HTML5 video/audio element, or downloading for local storage, or use in some other way.

https://blog.archive.org/2009/07/01/archive-org-supports-the... would seem to address your claim.

Video service is special because it is expensive on account of video files being large. You’re pulling a lot of bandwidth off Archive when you embed HTML5 onto your site. On its face, that’s a pretty shitty thing to leech from a charitable organization; YouTube pays for that with advertising. Archive takes donations. Are you donating?

I’m confused that you think this isn’t relevant. You’re directly advocating hotlinking against Archive and you don’t even mention supporting their operation in the slightest. I have no idea what you think I said, because your reply makes little sense.

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