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.
The problem about the “automatically adjust resolution and bitrate” can be done in two ways:
Using a GPU to transcode the 4k video in real time (generally unavailable on VPS)
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
I honestly didn’t know that Youtube “unlisted” was even a thing; I’ve never posted a video to Youtube before, but this might be a promising idea. I’m assuming they still inject ads into unlisted videos, which is a major barrier for me… I hate ads.
I’ll admit that I’m a snob when it comes to video and audio quality; 4k/60 might be overkill, but I think at least 4k/30 has some merit in this case. Most modern phones and tablets (and TVs) are at least greater than 1080p, so assuming they’re watching the video horizontally, 1080p video would still result in a loss of quality. Would they care? Almost certainly not, but the idea of watching a UHD video source in a lower resolution bothers me far more than it should.
It definitely seems like VPS hosting is out of my budget. I think that hosting multiple version of the same video (and paying for more HDD space) would probably be cheaper than a VPS with a GPU resources, but the recurring fees are probably more than I’m willing to spend.