I have a decent amount of video footage that I’d like to share with friends and family. My first thought was Youtube, but this is all home videos that I really don’t want to share publicly.
A large portion of my video footage is 4k/60, so I’m ideally looking for a solution where I can send somebody a link, and it gives a “similar to Youtube” experience when they click on the link. And by “similar to Youtube,” I mean that the player automatically adjusts the video bitrate and resolution based on their internet speed. Trying to explain to extended family how to lower the bitrate if the video starts buffering isn’t really an option. It needs to “just work” as soon as the link is clicked; some of the individuals I’d like to share video with are very much not technically inclined.
I’d like to host it on my homelab, but my internet connection only has a 4Mbit upload, which is orders of magnitude lower than my video bitrate, so I’m assuming I would need to either use a 3rd-party video hosting service or set up a VPS with my hosting software of choice.
Any suggestions? I prefer open-source self-hosted software, but I’m willing to pay for convenience.
Maybe Jellyfin, where I believe you can force a low bitrate for every remote client. It wouldn’t be “adjust to internet speed” but you could minimise buffering that way.
Note that for jellyfin (or any software) to reduce the bitrate it will have to transcode the video
Of course. Youtube and the like “pre-transcode” it so that would be one way for Jellyfin to better solve it, at the cost of a significant amount of disk space.
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I’m a big fan of Jellyfin. I run it at home with a dedicated Nvidia A2000 for hardware transcoding. It’s able to transcode multiple 4k streams with tonemapping faster than they can play.
As much as I’d love to use Jellyfin, there are two major issues: My internet connection is so slow, that I’d be lucky to stream 720p at a low bitrate. I’d spend the money on a faster connection, but I live in an area that doesn’t even get cell phone service. My options are DSL and Starlink, and I have both; the DSL is just slow, and Starlink uplink speed isn’t much better, plus I have plenty of obstructions that make it somewhat unreliable. The second problem is that Jellyfin has too steep of a learning curve. Telling my relatives “oh, if it starts buffering, just lower the bitrate” isn’t an option. Not to mention, I’d have to run it on a VPS, and hosting a VPS with the resources required for this is way too expensive for me.
and hosting a VPS with the resources required for this is way too expensive for me.
If you’re ok with using VPS from bottom-tier providers, you can get them for 10x cheaper than the usual cloud providers (or more during holiday sales) on lowendtalk.com.
The problem about the “automatically adjust resolution and bitrate” can be done in two ways:
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Using a GPU to transcode the 4k video in real time (generally unavailable on VPS)
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Encoding the video in multiple resolutions and bitrates, using much more disk space
Both solutions are expensive on a VPS.
In this case when I need to share stuff in 4k 60 (basically never) I just host on YouTube unlisted and having Google foot the bill. Maybe think like this: the content really deserves to be 4k 60 fps? Home videos that I share with my family are downgraded to 720p as anyway they will watch it horizontal on a vertical screen
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Have you considered keeping them on YouTube but unlisted, so that they don’t show up on your profile nor in youtube searches?
Otherwise, you could create a Google Photos album, but either quality suffers, or the videos will take a lot of space.
All the other options I could suggest either call for a recurrent payment, but trust me, it gets tedious after a while (ie. VPS with Peertube or similar), or call for losing quality by a lot (ie. Whatsapp or Telegram channels/groups), or quickly become unpractical (ie. Mega, Dropbox…)
There are plenty of choices, and if you’re 100% sure you’re fine with recurring payments and having to constantly mantain a system/keep it updated and secure, then go ahead and make a VPS, but if you’d rather have it be convenient, look into additional YouTube settings or common alternatives like Vimeo.
Another option is to make the youtube video private. Then you have the option to only share it with specific people. If it’s unlisted, then anyone with the link can view it.
Hosting on a VPS will get expensive. 4K video takes up a lot of space. If you want adjustable quality, then you will need to store multiple copies of the video at various resolutions and bitrates. A cheap VPS won’t have a GPU to do real time transcoding.
I jad heard some users complain that youtube waa delisting private videos since they can’t share publically for ad revenue. Something to check into.
That wouldn’t surprise me. I’m sure they don’t want people using youtube their own private video archive. Storage isn’t free after all. If they didn’t want people to set videos to private, they would have removed the option though. Just don’t expect the videos to stay there forever.
I’d say private, not unlisted.
Yup, this is the answer - if they need to be able to open the video with just the link, there’s functionally no difference if it’s self-host or YouTube unlisted. Just a lot less effort.
If it is encoded properly, NextCloud links will just play. I’ve sent video to my “Which one is the right click?” Mother.
Mkv won’t play out of the box, but most mp4’s do. I self host, but I have a higher upstream than you do. (I get about 12. Slow, but it does generally work.)
How big? Might be easier to dump it on an external HDD and just share it around.
I think bunny.net has something like that. Not self hosted but still much less distasteful than the big companies imho.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Plex Brand of media server package VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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