Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

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.

> 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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com