Comment by jacobgkau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobgkau | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

~~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.

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

Does it handle buffer?

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...

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

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.

Have you tried cloudflare r2?

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