Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

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I also don't buy this argument about YouTube depending on downloaders:

> They perform a valuable role: If it were impossible to download YouTube videos, many organizations would abandon hosting their videos on YouTube for a platform that offered more user flexibility. Or they’d need to host a separate download link and put it in their YouTube descriptions. But organizations don’t need to jump through hoops -- they just let people use YouTube downloaders.

No, organizations simply use YouTube because it's free, extremely convenient, has been very stable enough over the past couple decades to depend on, and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative.

Also, I'm guessing such organizations represent a vanishly small segment of YouTube's uploaders.

I don't think people appreciate how much YouTube has created a market. "Youtuber" is a valid (if often derided) job these days, where creators can earn a living wage and maintain whole media companies. Preserving that monetization portal is key to YouTube and its content creators.

> and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative.

Can confirm at least one tech news website argued this point and tore down their own video hosting servers in favor of using Youtube links/embeds. Old videos on tweakers.net are simply not accessible anymore, that content is gone now

This was well after HTML5 was widely supported. As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard now that we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page. They made it sound like they need to employ an expensive developer to continuously work on improving this and fixing bugs whereas from my POV you're pretty much there with running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this) and having a quality selector below the video. Can't imagine what about this would have changed in the past decade in a way that requires extra development work. At most you re-evaluate every 5 years which quality levels ffmpeg should generate and change an integer in a config file...

Alas, little as I understand it, this tiny amount of extra effort, even when the development and setup work is already in the past(!), is apparently indeed a driving force in centralizing to Youtube for for-profits

> As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard now that we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page.

You acknowledge that it's not that simple:

> running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this)

Can any old server really handle that? And can it handle the resulting storage of not only the highest-quality copy but also all the other copies added on top? My $5 Linode ("any old server") does not have the storage space for that. You can switch your argument to "storage is cheap these days," but now you're telling people to upgrade their servers and not actually claiming it's a one-click process anymore.

I use Vimeo as a CDN and pay $240 per year for it ($20/month, 4x more than I spend on the Linode that hosts a dozen different websites). If Vimeo were to shut down tomorrow, I'd be pretty out of luck finding anyone offering pricing even close to that-- for example, ScaleEngine charges a minimum of $25 per month and doesn't even include storage and bandwidth in their account fee. Dailymotion Pro offers a similar service to Vimeo these days, but their $9/month plan wouldn't have enough storage for my catalog, and their next cheapest price is $84/month. If you actually go to build out your own solution with professional hosting, it's not gonna be a whole lot cheaper.

Obviously, large corporations can probably afford to do their own hosting-- and if push came to shove, many of them probably would, or would find one of those more expensive partner options. But again, you're no longer arguing "it's just an HTML tag." You're now arguing they should spend hundreds or thousands per year on something that may be incidental to their business.

Have you tried cloudflare r2?

Here's me hosting a bunch of different bitrates of a high quality video, which I encoded on a 2016 laptop. http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/

The server is $30/month hosted by OVH, which comes with 2TB of storage. The throughout on the dedicated server is 1gbps. Unlimited transfer is included (and I've gone through many dozens of TB of traffic in a month).

People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible.

Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s.

Big ups on keeping independent.

~~Likely much less than .25/m if that’s mbps. The issue is you’d have no shortage of money at that scale - I run one of the two main Arch Linux package mirrors in my country and while it’s admittedly a quite niche and small distro in comparison, I’m nowhere close enough to saturate 1gbit on normal days, let alone my 10gbit link~~

It’s a trade off I suppose - you can very well host your own streaming solution, and for the same price you can get a great single node, but if you want good TTFB and nodes with close proximity to many regions you may as well pay for a managed solution as the price for multiple VPS/VM stacks up quickly when you have a low budget

Edit: I think I missed your point about bandwidth pricing lol, but the second still stands

Yeah, currently hosting LLHLS edge nodes in US + EU and caching CDN worldwide. The base cost grows if you have an audience of e.g. 2000 live viewers for a 2mbps stream = 4gbps.

Could be a lot cheaper and less need for global distribution if low latency weren't a requirement. And by low latency I mean the video stream you watch is ~2s behind reality just like Youtube, Twitch, Kick, etc. If your use case is VOD or can tolerate 10s latency streaming, single PoP works fine.

The point is that if I chose Vimeo or AWS/GCP/Azure for this, at their bandwidth pricing my (in my opinion modest) usage would be costing tens of thousands of dollars monthly, which it most certainly does not.

Managed service pricing and the perception of it needs to change, because it feels like a sham once you actually do anything yourself.

No lol nobody is reading the numbers. Vimeo is $20 / mo. Vimeo + $5 Linode server = $25 / mo, cheaper than the $30 / mo OVH server. The quoted ScaleEngine is $25 / mo, which ($25 + $5 = $30) the same as the OVH server.

Y'all just have two different budgets. For one person $30 / mo is reasonable for the other it's expensive.

But the core claim, that $5 / mo hosts a lot of non-video content but not much video content, holds.

Tbh, the $5 claim was in response to me but I never said any VPS would have the storage capacity to host a catalogue. I said any server. Call it my self-hoster's bias but I really did picture a hardware server with a hard drive in it, not a virtual access tier with artificial limits

But yeah okay, not any server variant can do this and the cloud premium is real. You'd need so spend like 5€/month on real hard drives if you want, say, 4TB of video storage on top of your existing website (the vimeo and dailymotion price points mentioned suggest that their catalogue is above 1 but below 2 TB). The 5€/month estimate is based on the currently most-viewed 4TB hard drive model in the tweakers pricewatch (some 100€), a modest average longevity of 5 years, triple redundancy, and that you would otherwise be running on smaller drives anyway for your normal website and images so there's no (significant) additional labor or electricity costs for storage (as in, you just buy a different variant of the same setup, not need to install additional ones)

You misread the bandwidth cost part of my comment.

A $28/mo (Australian) vimeo subscription, or the "Advanced" $91/mo plan include the same 2TB bandwidth/month for viewers of your videos.

If you upload a 100MB video and it gets 20000 views the whole way through, you are now in the "contact sales" category of pricing.

This is why Youtube has a monopoly, because you've been badly tricked into thinking this pricing is fair and that 2TB is in any way shape or form adequate.

I'm on mobile, but what player did you use on your website?

Does it handle buffer?

Not the person above but they're using Video.js 7.10.2 <http://videojs.com/>

Fwiw, the browser's built-in player does buffering. You don't need to custom-code that, you can just use <video>. The browser also exposes via Javascript when it estimates that the download speed and buffer size is sufficient such that you can start playback without interruption: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaEl...

Doesn't cloudflare and amazon have this now? Pretty sure CF is developing a closed source player- but theres plenty of FOSS ones (rip the one jellyfin uses out of it- at worst).

And, theres plenty of tutorials on using ffmpeg based tools to make the files. And yes, "oh no, I need to learn something new for my video workflow."

> And yes, "oh no, I need to learn something new for my video workflow."

That's rude and uncalled for. I didn't say I was unwilling to learn something new. I said the economics don't work out for the solution someone else proposed. And I also disputed the statement, "we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page." Now you've moved the goalpost to "learn something new" (which actually means "design and deploy an entire new system").

Just use CloudFlare R2 object storage with free bandwidth. It's specifically cleared for use as a video hoster.

It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave.

Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people.

Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video.

Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular.

If you don't have a huge viewership or dynamic content then yeah, it's actually pretty easy to setup and run videos sites (infowars has managed it). Target h264 and aac audio with a set number of resolutions and bitrates and viola, you've got something that's pretty competitive on the cheap that can play on pretty much any device.

It's not optimal for bandwidth, for that you need to start sniffing client capabilities. However, it'll get the job done while being pretty much universally playable.

Thing with Infowars is, they got a lot of rich people and probably Russia paying the bills. Video hosting still is damn expensive if you are not one of the top dogs.

> apply high quality compression on videos that become popular

Do they put a different amount of compression effort in if the video isn't (expected to become) popular?

I don't know what the Youtube compression queue looks like.

I'd not be shocked if they do more aggressive compression for well known creators.

For nobodies (like myself) the compression is very basic. Whatever I send ends up compressed with VP9 which, I believe, youtube has a bunch of hardware that can do that really fast.

Is there someone in the world for whom this demo https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... does not play? Because that's what I use and am not aware of issues with it

> Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

It's hard to say whether MDN and I have/am better programmer(s) and resource(s) than reddit without having any examples or notions of what issues reddit has run into.

If you mean achieving feature-parity, like automatic subtitles and dubbing and control menus to select languages and format those subtitles etc., that's a whole different ball game of course. The site I was speaking of doesn't support that today either (they don't dub/sub), at best you get automatically generated Dutch subtitles from yt now, i.e. shit subtitles (worse than English autogen and we all know how well those deal with jargon and noise)

You're linking to a page with a 5 second 1MB video on it. Yes, it's easy to use the <video> element to serve a video file no larger than a picture. No, that does not mean you have a system that will allow thousands of users to watch an 11 min HD video during their subway ride that starts instantly and never pauses, stutters, or locks up.

I can't speak to Dutch websites but in the U.S., a news website will usually feel obligated to provide subtitles on their videos to avoid lawsuits under the ADA.

Oh that's interesting! The US is portrayed here as this free for all country (limited unemployment money, health services, PTO...) but then subtitles are mandatory? That's cool! I presume we don't have such a law since the news sites I frequent don't seem to offer that for most videos (not counting youtube's autogenerated attempt for the few sites that outsource video hosting to google)

As for that video being small and not receiving thousands of simultaneous views: sure, but buying sufficient bandwidth is not a "hire better programmers" problem. You don't need to beat Reddit's skills and resources to provide smoother video playback. Probably the opposite actually: smaller scale should be easier to handle than reddit scale, and they already had that all set up

Yeah organizations don't use YouTube for file access, that's just not a good way to operate a video department in a business. Also the quality is terrible and adding another set of reencodes will make it even worse.

I've seen public schools and public courts use YouTube to host their videos. I don't quite follow why they would care so much about either using downloaders themselves or their users having access to downloaders that they'd switch providers. To me it is unlikely but plausible.

But even if they did - I don't see why Google would care about these organizations. I expect anyone doing this is not expecting to get any views from the algorithm, is not bringing in many views or monetizing their videos.

To steelman it though, maybe Google cares if their monopoly benefits from nobody even knowing other video sites exist.

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