Bonum Certa Men Certa

There's No Free Lunch in Video Hosting

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 09, 2024

Video hosting done correctly:

GNU's TEDx talk

SO the latest political campaign of Daniel Pocock (the Irish General Election in November) has kicked off. We may write more about it in the weekend or next week. That has already led us to some fruitful discussion about censorship-resistant and latency-free (or minimal latency) video hosting. Having done video and audio for quite some time in this site (that mostly started in 2010 with TechBytes), I inevitably became familiar with pros and cons of various forms of self-hosting and outsourcing, e.g. YouTube.

Pocock asked me about video hosting. "One of the challenges from last time is video hosting," he explained. "I want to make sure the videos play smoothly. People can wait a few seconds for pictures to load in a blog but they become irritated if videos are stuttering."

As readers are aware, we self-host everything (even old episodes of TechBytes). The Free Software Foundation (FSF) outsourced to a third party as the primary node of PeerTube and some years ago Debian gave money to PeerTube (which is funny because Debian also takes a lot of money of YouTube's Google, i.e. competitor of PeerTube). Debian tries to silence Pocock because of things he knows as a former insider of Debian (his first contributions to Debian date back to the 1990s).

I personally tried all sorts of things, including PeerTube (I know its limitations), and the FSF uses MediaGoblin for the most part (it is AGPL-licensed software and it has dependencies). The GNU Project is self-hosting many of its videos, i.e. more or less the same as us. No dependencies necessary; just serve the raw file/s.

"Do you have any insights on hosting the video content in a way that is respectful of privacy and freedom," Pocock asked, "e.g. not on YouTube?"

"Maybe I will use IPFS for the video," he said. He did this in the past and I told him that "IPFS is not good for videos, there is latency in lookup (can take minutes). PeerTube might be OK if you host it from a datacentre (like blender3d), maybe even mediagoblin."

An associate of ours asked: "What about seeding a torrent in addition?"

Well, torrents are similar to IPFS. They work similarly, more so P2P-type protocols. Availability isn't assured and latency can be high.

Aside from performance concerns, there's always the aspect of censorship.

"Hosting in a data center still requires a reliable ISP," Pocock said. "Do you think your ISP would host videos reliably and without bucking to pressure? The campaign won't include any content that you haven't already seen."

Webosts and ISPs sometimes play a role in censorship and that's perhaps a subject for us to explore and cover some other time (or year). We've never censored a video or were asked to take a video down. If one relies on something like YouTube or even Mastodon (it's not much better than most Social Control Media), censorship will be routine and frequent. With PeerTube it's harder to censor and the LBRY-type things likewise. However, generally speaking, self-hosting one's videos seem like the best way, even if storage and traffic aren't cheap, especially 'at scale'. Then again, they say there's no free lunch; if you aren't paying for hosting and serving of "your" videos, you're not the customer and those videos, once uploaded, aren't quite yours anymore.

there's no (such thing as a) free lunch

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims or says can be trusted
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
A rough summary
Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
 
Richard Stallman Will Give a Talk in Sweden in 6 Days
Dr. Stallman, despite his battle with cancer is still alive and mentally sharp
FSF Turns 40
We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
Links for the day
We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
Google News is really bad
Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day