So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon.
Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin.
Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
Hosting and bandwidth for videos has a big cost. Though I do wonder what these costs would be for an individual creator to host their own creations.
I admit I haven’t looked into how PeerTube works, with regards to space and bandwidth. If the federation is only at account-level and not space/bandwidth, it could be just a matter of propping up an instance where only the creator can upload videos.
Plus it’s computationally expensive. YouTube has entire data centers filled with servers using custom silicon to encode ingested videos into nearly every resolution/framerate and codec they serve, so that different clients get the most efficient option for their quality settings and supported codecs, no matter what the original uploader happened to upload. Granted, that workflow mainly makes sense because of bandwidth costs, but the high quality of the user experience depends on that backend.
Fascinating! I guess I should have known, because I use yt-dlp a lot and see each video has multiple formats available, but multimedia streaming is not my forte so I never put much thought into the technicalities.
Pardon the ignorant follow-up question: it doesn’t encode on-the-fly, right? It encodes upon uploading the source, then it keeps a copy of each format?
As I understand it, it ingests an uploaded video and automatically encodes it in a bunch of different quality settings in h.264, then, if the video is popular enough to justify the computational cost of encoding into AV1 and VP9, they’ll do that when the video reaches something like 1000 views. And yes, once encoded they just keep the copies so that it doesn’t have to be done again.
As that blog post explains, when you’re running a service that ingests 500 hours of user submitted video every minute, you’ll need to handle that task differently than how, for example, Netflix does (with way more video minutes being served, but a comparatively tiny amount of original video content to encode, where bandwidth efficiency becomes far more important than encoding computational efficiency).
I asked about that because I thought if it’s a one-time thing, then the uploader would be the one using their own computer to encode. Maybe they’re given a desktop software or a set configurations for, say, ffmpeg. It would certainly be less attractive than to just upload it and let the platform handle it.
Yeah, I think it’s doable to distribute that compute burden if each channel owner has a desktop CPU laying around to encode a bunch of video formats, but lots of people are doing stuff directly on their phones, and I don’t think a phone CPU/GPU would be able to process a significant amount of video without heat/power issues.
The other thing to keep in mind is that youtube (and twitch, and shudders quora), with all its problems, does share revenue with creators on the platform, instead of treating them as free labor.
I would love to see it, but I dont think we are there yet. No impetus to switch combined with much more expensive tech. I would also antipate dmca to turn the whole thing into a mess. But one day we’ll get there hopefully.
Yeah, that was why my comment was more aimed at personal hosting, as opposed to a shared one.
Say, I don’t know, a known figure like jackscepticeye (to name a big streamer) hiring a server and creating his own instance of a fediverse software that allows him to host all his videos, where he gets to decide which ad-provider to use, how to control subscription tiers, and so on.
Even a smaller creator could do this, as costs would scale with popularity but so would revenue.
I’m not sure if PeerTube can do this, or if it would have to be a completely different software, though.
As for DMCAs, that would be the responsibility of each creator, of course. They would no longer have the “protection” of corporations like Youtube and Twitch.
Self-management is a big ordeal.
It’s one of those pro/con things each person must weigh upon when making a decision: “sure, Twitch/Youtube takes a piece of the pie and gets pushy with copyright, but I don’t have to deal with servers or DMCAs or paying the hosting directly”.
(Edit: thing is, right now, there’s really no option.)
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Hosting and bandwidth for videos has a big cost. Though I do wonder what these costs would be for an individual creator to host their own creations.
I admit I haven’t looked into how PeerTube works, with regards to space and bandwidth. If the federation is only at account-level and not space/bandwidth, it could be just a matter of propping up an instance where only the creator can upload videos.
Plus it’s computationally expensive. YouTube has entire data centers filled with servers using custom silicon to encode ingested videos into nearly every resolution/framerate and codec they serve, so that different clients get the most efficient option for their quality settings and supported codecs, no matter what the original uploader happened to upload. Granted, that workflow mainly makes sense because of bandwidth costs, but the high quality of the user experience depends on that backend.
Fascinating! I guess I should have known, because I use yt-dlp a lot and see each video has multiple formats available, but multimedia streaming is not my forte so I never put much thought into the technicalities.
Pardon the ignorant follow-up question: it doesn’t encode on-the-fly, right? It encodes upon uploading the source, then it keeps a copy of each format?
As I understand it, it ingests an uploaded video and automatically encodes it in a bunch of different quality settings in h.264, then, if the video is popular enough to justify the computational cost of encoding into AV1 and VP9, they’ll do that when the video reaches something like 1000 views. And yes, once encoded they just keep the copies so that it doesn’t have to be done again.
Here’s a 2-year-old blog post where YouTube describes some of the technical challenges.
As that blog post explains, when you’re running a service that ingests 500 hours of user submitted video every minute, you’ll need to handle that task differently than how, for example, Netflix does (with way more video minutes being served, but a comparatively tiny amount of original video content to encode, where bandwidth efficiency becomes far more important than encoding computational efficiency).
Thanks a lot for the explanation and the link.
I asked about that because I thought if it’s a one-time thing, then the uploader would be the one using their own computer to encode. Maybe they’re given a desktop software or a set configurations for, say, ffmpeg. It would certainly be less attractive than to just upload it and let the platform handle it.
Yeah, I think it’s doable to distribute that compute burden if each channel owner has a desktop CPU laying around to encode a bunch of video formats, but lots of people are doing stuff directly on their phones, and I don’t think a phone CPU/GPU would be able to process a significant amount of video without heat/power issues.
The other thing to keep in mind is that youtube (and twitch, and shudders quora), with all its problems, does share revenue with creators on the platform, instead of treating them as free labor.
I would love to see it, but I dont think we are there yet. No impetus to switch combined with much more expensive tech. I would also antipate dmca to turn the whole thing into a mess. But one day we’ll get there hopefully.
Yeah, that was why my comment was more aimed at personal hosting, as opposed to a shared one.
Say, I don’t know, a known figure like jackscepticeye (to name a big streamer) hiring a server and creating his own instance of a fediverse software that allows him to host all his videos, where he gets to decide which ad-provider to use, how to control subscription tiers, and so on.
Even a smaller creator could do this, as costs would scale with popularity but so would revenue.
I’m not sure if PeerTube can do this, or if it would have to be a completely different software, though.
As for DMCAs, that would be the responsibility of each creator, of course. They would no longer have the “protection” of corporations like Youtube and Twitch.
Self-management is a big ordeal.
It’s one of those pro/con things each person must weigh upon when making a decision: “sure, Twitch/Youtube takes a piece of the pie and gets pushy with copyright, but I don’t have to deal with servers or DMCAs or paying the hosting directly”.
(Edit: thing is, right now, there’s really no option.)