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.

  • @[email protected]
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    410 months ago

    Another option is to make the youtube video private. Then you have the option to only share it with specific people. If it’s unlisted, then anyone with the link can view it.

    Hosting on a VPS will get expensive. 4K video takes up a lot of space. If you want adjustable quality, then you will need to store multiple copies of the video at various resolutions and bitrates. A cheap VPS won’t have a GPU to do real time transcoding.

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months ago

      I had heard some users complain that youtube waa delisting private videos since they can’t share publically for ad revenue. Something to check into.

      • @[email protected]
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        410 months ago

        That wouldn’t surprise me. I’m sure they don’t want people using youtube their own private video archive. Storage isn’t free after all. If they didn’t want people to set videos to private, they would have removed the option though. Just don’t expect the videos to stay there forever.