Hacker News Reader

Comment by egonschiele | Hacker News Reader

I see there's a paid version of Streampot. My understanding is the ffmpeg license is pretty restrictive, and doesn't allow for any commercial use unless you sign a contract with them. Is that something Streampot has done? Just wondering because I have looked into using ffmpeg in a commercial project and the license stopped me from doing so.

View on HN

I am looking at https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html It doesn't look like FFmpeg themselves have any problem with commercial use. Unless you end up using the tech that falls under the mpeg pattents, based on what I am reading on the link above. Right? or are there other issues I am missing?

I didn't even look at the website to see they offered a paid service. Looking now -- even aside from potential license issues -- at risk of making yet another HN Dropbox comment, I'm curious how viable that is as a business model. What's being offered here? Running ffmpeg on their servers?

You'd figure anyone with a project with enough throughput for their "most popular" tier (5TB/month, 1000 requests/minute) and a budget of $165/month for video processing, they could wire up something on their own servers with not much effort. Even barring the cost of the service, I imagine it'd be cheaper to run that processing yourself staying within the server than it would be to upload it to another service and then download it again for thousands of videos.

Am I missing something?

You're missing the fact that video encoding is a whole different ballgame when it comes to what kind of CPU or VM you need. Any crappy oversubscribed cloud VM can host a website. Meanwhile ffmpeg wants at least dedicated cores, preferably entire dedicated servers.

Streampot lets you send 300 requests per minute for the cost of the cheapest dedicated server instance on hetzner.

Its not ffmpeg, its the codecs you have to worry about - if your posting the video publicly that is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com