It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave.
Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?
Is there someone in the world for whom this demo https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... does not play? Because that's what I use and am not aware of issues with it
> Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?
It's hard to say whether MDN and I have/am better programmer(s) and resource(s) than reddit without having any examples or notions of what issues reddit has run into.
If you mean achieving feature-parity, like automatic subtitles and dubbing and control menus to select languages and format those subtitles etc., that's a whole different ball game of course. The site I was speaking of doesn't support that today either (they don't dub/sub), at best you get automatically generated Dutch subtitles from yt now, i.e. shit subtitles (worse than English autogen and we all know how well those deal with jargon and noise)
You're linking to a page with a 5 second 1MB video on it. Yes, it's easy to use the <video> element to serve a video file no larger than a picture. No, that does not mean you have a system that will allow thousands of users to watch an 11 min HD video during their subway ride that starts instantly and never pauses, stutters, or locks up.
I can't speak to Dutch websites but in the U.S., a news website will usually feel obligated to provide subtitles on their videos to avoid lawsuits under the ADA.
Oh that's interesting! The US is portrayed here as this free for all country (limited unemployment money, health services, PTO...) but then subtitles are mandatory? That's cool! I presume we don't have such a law since the news sites I frequent don't seem to offer that for most videos (not counting youtube's autogenerated attempt for the few sites that outsource video hosting to google)
As for that video being small and not receiving thousands of simultaneous views: sure, but buying sufficient bandwidth is not a "hire better programmers" problem. You don't need to beat Reddit's skills and resources to provide smoother video playback. Probably the opposite actually: smaller scale should be easier to handle than reddit scale, and they already had that all set up
It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people.
Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video.
Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular.
If you don't have a huge viewership or dynamic content then yeah, it's actually pretty easy to setup and run videos sites (infowars has managed it). Target h264 and aac audio with a set number of resolutions and bitrates and viola, you've got something that's pretty competitive on the cheap that can play on pretty much any device.
It's not optimal for bandwidth, for that you need to start sniffing client capabilities. However, it'll get the job done while being pretty much universally playable.
> apply high quality compression on videos that become popular
Do they put a different amount of compression effort in if the video isn't (expected to become) popular?
I don't know what the Youtube compression queue looks like.
I'd not be shocked if they do more aggressive compression for well known creators.
For nobodies (like myself) the compression is very basic. Whatever I send ends up compressed with VP9 which, I believe, youtube has a bunch of hardware that can do that really fast.
Thing with Infowars is, they got a lot of rich people and probably Russia paying the bills. Video hosting still is damn expensive if you are not one of the top dogs.