In short, I'm just one person building this - so I'm sticking to what I know best. I want video to "just work" without having to worry about some video format/extension/containers that I have no idea about.
There are a number of video processing services, but Mux really is the best. The API is simple. They have a ton of really nice helper functions, that I use a lot (like timestamped thumbnails, preview gifs, and VTT storyboard generation), which I could easily spend a few days on making, and then countless hours maintaining.
I dont doubt that building video infra is a good idea, but just as I'm not about to train my own speech-to-text model, I'm not going to build out video infra.
At least for me, I'm more worried about the end user experience, and the more I can focus on that, the better the overall product will be.
I haven't had FFMPEG nightmares yet, but I've done relatively little with it so far.
Any video apps I should look out for? I'm also pursuing a content creation angle that I've yet to spec out, so I'm always curious as to how others have approached the problem.
> the business model won't tolerate the amount of video on someone else's service
Does that mean you aren't using S3/EC2 or the like, or is there something about how we've built our cloud platform that doesn't work for your business model? We've designed Mux to be a low-level primitive for video, like Twilio is for SMS, so I'd be interested if we're doing something that makes this harder for you.
Plus, it's a good chance to for me to learn the ins and outs of video. It's not reflective of the quality of your platform, just a choice I've made early in the piece for curiosity's sake.
If some credits or a startup discount are ever helpful, we have a startup program and can help out there. Let us know.
Email: lenny@milkvideo.com