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Ask HN: Videos on my website, youtube or selfhosted?

9 points by superice ↗ HN
Hey guys, I'm having quite a dilemma right now. Recently I made a video showing a piece of software from my startup. I put it up on youtube and embedded the link from the front page of the website. But it is slow. Really slow. The video alone increases page render time by over 2 seconds. Besides, I'm not in control of what ads or suggestions youtube shows after the video. Is it worth it to convert and encode the video to HTML5 formats and a flash fallback myself? Is that too much work and should I just accept the problems I'm having right now? What would you do? Any advice on this? Hosting space or bandwidth isn't quite an issue (yet).

21 comments

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lauriswtf
Have you tried vimeo? IMO it has better quality and has a pro subscription if needed.
superice
Will look into it, seems like a great website. Thanks!
zaroth
HTTP hosting has progressed so far - look at Web Platform Benchmarks as the perfect example. The situation for self-hosting video seems remarkably stark.

I would love for someone to chime in here on what options to consider for self-hosting video at low-cost/high-scale.

superice
The biggest tradeoff here is my time vs my visitors time. I could ofcourse just convert all video's myself, but every video again that takes a sh*tload of time, whereas youtube (or other video websites) are relatively simple to use and not very time intensive, but have a dramatic effect on my pageload time.
zaroth
Seems like a good idea for a startup. Product: self-hosted video. Which ultimately could take you in so many different directions, so many different market opportunities there.

Which means, someone has already thought of this and is trying to provide this service. So 'superice' you want to see what's out there and report back?

superice
I poked around for a bit, but I can't find what you mean. However, I did find an awful lot of websites that discourage self hosting video's :P

Seems like a great idea for a startup indeed: submit your video and in a few minutes, you get an e-mail with a link pointing to a zip with an example html file, 3 different HTML5 supported video formats and a flv file.

justhw
I'd stick with YouTube and customize it using their parameters. Youtube has a CDN and also detect browsers and servers html5 or flash.
MattBearman
I had the same problem with the YouTube video on BugMuncher's homepage. My solution was to just put an image in place of the video and use JavaScript to embed the video when the image is clicked - you can see it in action here http://bugmuncher.com
superice
That's absolutely awesome. A simple and pretty elegant solution. Your non-javascript fallback is just going to youtube.com?
MattBearman
Thanks. You are correct, the non-JavaScript fall back is just a link to the video on youtube. As well as being faster than putting the video straight into the page, I also think it looks better this way.

If you're interested, the JavaScript to do this is in this file - http://bugmuncher.com/assets/js/common.js - which reminds me, I really should minify that.

yen223
Youtube or Vimeo, unless videos are your product.

Video streaming is a major pain point that should be outsourced if possible.

thenomad
Self-hosting video in the modern day is an absolute bloody nightmare. Don't do it unless you have no other choice.

You may, however, want to investigate one of the other video hosting options out there who focus on business use. I've had some conversations with Wistia recently, and whilst they're wildly inappropriate for my use case, in general they seem quite impressive. Other options I'm aware of include Brightcove or hosting your video with a CDN.

jamesjguthrie
Don't try to 'reinvent the wheel' just put it on YouTube or similar.
jason_slack
I use video.js and host them myself, HTML5, no plug-ins, works on all devices. I host a very video intensive site that attracts a lot of visitors each day.