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Any good devs here who have done work in video streaming?

Any good devs here who have done work in video streaming?. I need to get a relatively simple streaming web app done and as I will be uploading my own content and hosting it. What would be the best way to move forward with? I have no clue and I don't really understand the price structure of AMAZON AWS...and is that something I should be looking at?. Some insights would be really helpful!

on March 5, 2019
  1. 3

    I work with video hosting for our business a bit and my suggestion is to not host the videos yourself on a server. Video hosting/streaming is a challenging task.

    You have 3 options:

    1. Build your own video infrastructure. It requires things like uploading, encoding, conversions and then streaming. Huge task. If just starting out, this is not recommended as it will take too much time and money. This option is where you have to learn tons about things like ffmpeg, hls/dash, nginx and tons of server stuff.

    2. Outsource the hard part (encoding/conversions etc) to an API such as mux.com (check them out, no affiliations but they are awesome). This still allows you to build your own User Interface but the hard part with streaming is taken care of.

    3. Use a service like vimeo.com to upload videos and then use the embed link in your platform. This is the easiest but doesn't give you control over the user interface a whole lot.

    Contact me if you want more advice on this as I have done all 3 above .

    1. 1

      Hi, is it possible to integrate Vimeo in ecommerce. Let say a plugin for my different ecommerce clients & in addition to that. I'd like to have a functionality that will aggregate the products & show to the viewers and have ability to Add to Cart.

    2. 1

      I also agree with this advice. Making all the infrastructure is going to be far more expensive than to use a 3 party provider.
      Besides Vimeo I can also suggest CloudFlare stream service https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ and also JWPlayer (their platform product) they basically handle the hard part (encoding, storage, distribution, client player) and you can still customize more features than Vimeo.

    3. 1

      Agree with this advice. You don't want to host your own infrastructure when you're getting started. It may look like the cheaper option in terms of pure infrastructure and bandwidth costs but you'll end up spending a huge amount more on development and support costs and you'll spend far more time on the video streaming implementation rather than the business itself.

      Source: worked on a high traffic UGC video streaming site a few years back

      Edit: we used https://www.brightcove.com with that site

  2. 2

    If anyone is seeking an answer nowadays, Mux has a nice spreadsheet of options:

    https://mux.com/blog/intro-guide-how-to-figure-out-which-live-streaming-platform-to-use-and-why/

    Interesting they don't list CloudFlare...

  3. 2

    Any video work I do in my apps is offloaded to Cloudinary- the less I need to deal with videos myself, the better! :) Their APIs are pretty solid and I've had no trouble with uploading, embedding, uptime, etc.

  4. 2
    1. Rent real physical servers, it's cheap nowadays, check hetzner.com
    2. Use HLS + FFMPEG + Nginx for live-streaming (google it)
    3. For VOD you can store files at server and display them using <video> tags, you can literally start with uploading files via FTP to server and adding it in HTML, you can always upgrade website later
    1. 1

      Thank you! The main thing is I want it as smooth as youtube videos are - experience wise. I know they might have super good tech but I want that level of smoothness and fast loading for video.

      Btw are you a developer? and have you done video web apps?

      1. 1

        Yes, I still do code sometimes, but usually we build app as a team, I'm playing CTO role. Yes, I have large scale video apps in my background (1m users/day). To keep your video-service smooth you need to use CDN(s) and be ready for horizontal scaling, as video smoothness is based on connection width and qty of simultaneous users.

        As mentioned before — you may need transcoding and transmuxing to provide different video size and formats for all devices and screens.

        FYI we can have a call to discuss details.

  5. 1

    It's a great topic and I also want to learn about it!

  6. 1

    We are working on a hybrid video app https://priviw.com/ for the similar thoughts where we do not host videos but we can take the videos from Youtube, Vimeo, DailyMotion and it can be self hosted as well. If you are looking for similar solution , please free to contact me.

    App link : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.priviw.video.cinemas It is still in early stages

  7. 0

    Hey @thekreator Our expert developers are able to do it. Rent dedicated developer from www.designpac.net

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