Show HN: Discord utility to compress video to 8MB | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Discord utility to compress video to 8MB

8mb.video

11 pointsdustball9 comments

The neat thing is that incoming bandwidth to AWS is free, so people upload 100's of megabytes and we only get billed for the 8MB we send back. (CPU time/cost to transcode is negligible).

Why the 8 MB limit? Is this a limit on Discord?

Yes. That's their free limit. If you pay $5/mo you get 50MB and $10/month gets you 100MB uploads. All of which seem like low limits to me, shrug.

Somewhat related: This semester we got a Moodle in the university. Sometimes the students write the homework in paper and upload a photo to the site. But the maximum files size is 1Mb, that is like the average size of a photo of a paper, so half of the time they have a problem. So if you want to diversify later, you can try with photos. (Good luck getting students to pay for this, but it may be a losing lead.)

Some questions after writing my unrelated comment: [Instant Edit: I tried it now.]

Can I choose a smaller size? [I only can choose bigger sizes. Can I choose smaller sizes?]

Do you add a watermark? [No]

Do you preserve sound? [Yes :), and I can mute it too :).]

More feature requests after trying it:

Can I change the resolution of the video?

It would be nice to see the options before I click upload file.

After I download the video it is not longer available (as promised). Perhaps it would be nice to add some javascript trick to change the link from "Download xyz.mp4" to "You have already downloaded the video. Click here to upload a new one."

The name of the video is uninteligible. Perhaps it should be something like "8mb.uploaded_file_name.mp4".

Thank you for taking the time to write all this great feedback.

I am very appreciative.

Photos: Yes I actually recently added support for photos. It just resizes them to 1080p resolution. So not very flexible but all software must start somewhere. Give it a shot? They tend to be around 0.1MB.

I bought the domain 8mb.app .. maybe should switch names since it does more then video?

What kind of watermark do you want to add? text? graphic?

What video resolution do you want? Right now it reduces video to 720p, or keeps it the same if already smaller.

> It would be nice to see the options before I click upload file.

What do you mean?

> Perhaps it would be nice to add some javascript trick to change the link from "Download xyz.mp4" to "You have already downloaded the video. Click here to upload a new one."

Yes! Good idea! Will do.

> Perhaps it should be something like "8mb.uploaded_file_name.mp4".

That would make sense. I will consider it.

If you have more feedback, I'm listening because those were great points.

Watermark: I worried that the free version adds a watermark.

Resolution: I tried with a smaller video. 720p is probably fine.

>> It would be nice to see the options before I click upload file.

The landing page only says "Upload file..." and after I click it I get the options like 8/50/100Mb. Why do I have to click "Upload file"?

The advanced options like "mute" are hidden by default. I think it is a good idea to hide them initially.

8mb.video is a service that compresses video, images and audio to just under Discord's 8MB upload limit.

This is very cool! Any plans for more granular file sizes?

Possibly - whats your use case?

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