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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I think these automatic suspensions are really alarming.

I got my whole Vimeo account suspended by some script that had the impression I was violating some of their ToS. I just uploaded 3 demo videos of an app I created. Then they told me I should click on a link to contact support, where they told me I have to log in to contact support, which I couldn't do because my account was shut down.

I just released a blog article that needed these videos, so I didn't have any time for these things so I quickly uploaded the videos to Youtube.

I mean that was just a small account with three videos, but they simply nuked the whole thing. That's just crazy.

I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time.

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> Then they told me I should click on a link to contact support, where they told me I have to log in to contact support, which I couldn't do because my account was shut down.

Gotta love Silicon Valley Customer Service!! The same thing happened to me with LinkedIn. Multiple Catch-22s and/or Chicken and the Egg.

Same with Uber.

And Facebook, to report a security issue with accounts getting falsely taken down, after my account got taken down.

https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1176234693466787840?s=19 https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1176246620452573184?s=19 https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1183808406601097216?s=19

  Silicon Valley Customer Service!!

Vimeo is in NYC.

The HQ does not need to be in Silicon Valley to adopt the ethos.

Maybe this is unsuitable for your use-case, but these days it's pretty easy to embed video yourself with the <video> tag and an MP4 file. Example: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2018/03/23/oxalis-leaf-open...

Video can still cost a lot of bandwidth on your personal hosting. .. I've actually been meaning to rehost all the stuff I have on either Vimeo or YouTube on a personal PeerTube instance, change all my embeds on my blog to point to PeerTube with YouTube/Viemo removed and links under the video to those respective sites as mirrors.

None of my stuff gets enough attention for me to care about exposure, but big content creators who rely on YouTube ads really can't get away from it.

The problem with peertube is that it leaks your IP to everyone else watching the video.

I've been looking at the same thing.

> Video can still cost a lot of bandwidth on your personal hosting.

Jesus Christ. Just pay for the bandwidth! You can't at the same time go "I dont want to be subjected to this automation stuff" and "I don't want to pay!"

More like use a dedicated server or vps host that bundles several TBs of bandwidth. It isn't hard to get ~20TB of bandwidth for $100-$200, compared to however much that would cost at aws/gcp.

10 euros a month for a 16tb bandwidth openVZ server at Time4vps. I have a 1TB storage server for 17 euros a quarter and it has 4 TB of bandwidth.

referral https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=1881&_ga=2.233890075.4420892...

Vimeo, which the original person was using, is a paid service.

The videos don't have to be on your standard host. You could stick them on S3 or something, which might be cheaper, and is more portable than Vimeo or YouTube.

> I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time.

Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other static file?

What are the financial and technical implications of this?

That of course depends on how popular your videos becomes, but for the 99% videos I would say none since you already pay for hosting your web site.

Technically its pretty easy with the video tag and HTML5. Financially it will probably not be an issue unless their videos become very popular and at that point they could always move elsewhere or pay for more bandwidth. But discoverability is an issue. People search for videos on Youtube, but no one will know about your personal domain.

I see... I think dev.to, the blogging platform I use, supports video-uploads too.

Otherwise, I'll take a look into S3/CloudFront.

Didn't even think that far, lol. Thanks for the info!

Technically, your users will get a sub-par experience.

Those on 3g will have to wait ages for the video to buffer. Those on an old device won't be able to play it at all if you used new codecs. Users won't be able to select playback quality, and on a slow connection, they'll get endless buffering.

You'll have to come up with your own systems for counting how many people viewed the video and which bits they bailed out on. You'll have to reinvent caption translations and go to extra effort to get captions working at all.

Self hosted videos have mostly died for the above reasons.

Adaptive streaming doesn't seem to be a difficult problem to solve. Most cloud providers offer video streaming services that can transparently sit in front of your domain or you can serve something like HLS or MPEG-DASH files through an appropriate js player. I must admit though I have no personal experience with this and am sure any home-rolled solution will be vastly inferior to Youtube et al, but it is possible and may satisfy the use cases of many people who don't want to put all their eggs into one basket.

You can provide links for different qualities and let user decide which one is better. Subtitles are supported by HTML video tag, you don't need to invent anything.

> Those on 3g will have to wait ages for the video to buffer. Those on an old device won't be able to play it at all if you used new codecs.

This advice is pretty stale: 3G is rather old by now – 4G came out in 2009 – and unless you’re still supporting IE8 HTML5 makes it easy to let the browser select from multiple sources (subtitles have similarly had wide support for at least half a decade). Properly hinted video will start playing pretty quickly — certainly not massively slower than someone with 3G on an old device is going to experience everywhere else, especially since that old device isn’t going to pick the 4K version anyway.

> This advice is pretty stale: 3G is rather old by now – 4G came out in 2009

When traveling to places with 4G or LTE coverage I'm often downgraded to 3G or edge. My parents' home has mostly 2G/edge connectivity, with some spotty 3G coverage on the second floor. They're "only" on the outskirts of a greater metropolitan area.

Just because some tech is old doesn't mean it's not very much still relevant.

You can’t look at this without considering the context: yes, there are areas with marginal coverage (I also have relatives in that situation) but if you’re in one of them you are either not watching video over cellular because the experience is unpleasant or you’re used to it being slow and an extra second to start is a drop in the bucket. The number of people who are on very slow connections who are also highly latency sensitive just isn’t a significant percentage of users for most sites, and most sites have many areas for performance improvements before they need to tackle that problem.

I actually force my cellphone to 3G since I can watch everything in 1080p with it and I never lose connection like I do with 4G

I managed to do adaptive streaming as a 14 year old (in 2014) and it worked for 10 000 people. It didnt cost me that much, given I made profit of 80$ off of adsense before being banned and almost sued but thats a different thing.

The point is with HLS or DASH and CloudFlare you can provide the exact same experience to all your users. You can easily automate the process, which I've done. All other problems are already solved by player software like Clappr, JWPlayer, VideoJS, etc. They all use HLS.js and Dash.js in the background...

One nasty implication is that adaptive bandwidth streaming as YouTube and Vimeo provide is tricky to get right. It’s definitely beyond “any other static file.”

It’s a nice feature to allow clients to stream the max bitrate they can handle without buffering. Without this, you sacrifice either quality of those with good connections, or the complete experience of those with poor ones. I ended up struggling with ffmpeg and JPlayer which is never a good day.

Additionally, you need to make sure you use the right codec, something supported on FF, Chrome, and Linux/Mac/Windows/Android/iOS. Due to codec power struggles, this is not self evident.

Hosting video is harder than it seems :(

On Digital Ocean's S3-compatible service for example, $5/month gets you 250GB storage and 1TB egress. $0.02/GB additional storage and $0.01/GB additional egress.

So if you have 5GB of videos that ALL get watched 10,000 times you will be out $500, so maybe problematic. Or calculated another way, 2.2mbps is good for 720p and comes out to 1GB/hour, so your cost is basically $0.01 per hour of video streamed (plus $5/month).

How does this change with a CDN on front? Are those prices similar, more expensive or less?

CloudFront is $0.085 per GB out, S3 is almost the same.

But as far as I know, CF has more free traffic than S3.

That's the case of premature optimization.

You are not going to get even one video watched 10k times, not to mention all of those videos. 10K video views is pretty darn close to head rather than the tail.

If you did, you would be making a million a year like @BrunchBoys on IG and hiring people to build an independent platform so when Youtube/Google/FB shut you down you would still have a way to deliver your awesome videos and make money.

P.S. You can always proxy EC2 traffic through the Lightsail to have a cheap delivery.

Or, you might get a random HN/Reddit (Slashdot, haha) hug of love, and that's -500 USD for you, and no +1 000 000 at the end of the year, because it was a one time thing.

You might get 10k people to start watching a video. They're not each going to watch five hours.

I heart a lot of these magic hugs of love and I can tell you excluding teen boy bands with a gaggle of screaming teenage girls using their phones to live stream from concerts or pirate pay per view boxing matches I have never seen anything close to it.

10K views of a video that's more than a few minutes long is a big deal. Having a hundred of those means a producer is either a celebrity or a real business specializing in video content.

The financial implications depend a lot on your provider. AWS has usurious prices at 90 USD/TB, with Google Cloud and Azure being similarly expensive.

While traditional hosters often include traffic with their offerings or charge a much lower amount. For example Hetzner (Big traditional German hoster) costs 1 EUR/TB and traffic is inclusive with most bigger/dedicated offers.

> usurious

Nitpick: you mean either "extortionate" or something to do with ogliopolies, cartels, and price fixing; usury is when the perpetrator charges interest on a non-defaultable loan.

I think in this case this word was used for simple dramatic emphasis, and somehow usury seems like a more white-collar thing than extortion, so maybe felt like the better "analogy"?

You could host them on some peertube instance

https://joinpeertube.org/en/#register

You can also use something like Peertube or another implementation of WebTorrent.

People say google has good engineers, and that their systems have few bugs. However, their algorithmic bugs routinely de-platform people and often seem to take away people’s incomes (eg, the AdWords people losing accounts every other day). To me, that sounds like one of the most severe types of bugs possible and the Internet is rife with these stories

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