Hi, Replying off-list because not an OpenBSD issue.
On 22 June 2016 at 01:49, jsg <f...@speednet.com> wrote: > For those of you running http in support of your business, are any of > you providing > videos for your customers ? > If so what packages and set-up are you using? > Any advice guidance appreciated. > Some background: I look after video transcoding and delivery for a news-media organisation. We serve around 200-250TB of video content a month, mostly short videos up to a couple of minutes long, sometimes much longer. New videos every day, sometimes hundreds of them. There's a lot to learn here but I'll make a few major points: * there's two major types of video delivery (plus Adobe Flash, but we're in 2016 now!): - Progressive: one big file per video bit-rate. Nice and simple, and works on pretty much all non-Apple devices, including Chrome/Firefox - Adaptive: multiple files per video bit-rate, with manifest files to help devices find all the files. Used on Apple devices. Otherwise known as HLS, or HTTP Live Streaming. Check browser support carefully. When I last tried it, this HLS was not supported in Chrome/Firefox. * some web platforms also only support one or the other. Eg. Facebook, as far as I'm aware, only supports Progressive delivery. * a webserver that supports Range headers/HTTP 206 responses is important if you are serving Progressive videos that aren't very short; this can help the user seek within your video * don't forget to set Cache-Control headers * if you expect to serve a lot of content, consider a CDN. We use Akamai, but they are quite expensive and if you don't need all the fancy features, not worth the money. Maybe Fastly, Amazon Cloudfront or even Varnish Software's "DIY CDN" toolset? * it's easy to provide users on desktop and iOS a consistent, pleasant user experience with video * two years ago it was pretty much impossible to provide users on Android a consistent user experience with video. I don't know if this situation has improved or not. Probably not :-( For transcoding, the standard seems to be ffmpeg. I strongly suspect this is what underpins most commercial transcoding platforms (eg. Brightcove's Zencoder [which is what we use...], Amazon ElasticTranscoder, Akamai's transcoding product, etc) and that what you pay for with the commercial products is support and "glue" infrastructure. I don't have any references to back this up, though. I do know that ffmpeg is what we used before we (for unrelated reasons) switched over to Brightcove's platform, and at least one other major media organisation here also uses ffmpeg. Probably most of them do, really. Put some serious effort into tracking what your users are viewing. Eg. with the previous version of our video platform, we noticed that >98% of Progressive video views were of the maximum bitrate, and ~95% for Adaptive. So we were able to eliminate the renditions that almost nobody looked at, and saved a lot of storage. It also tells us that maybe we could look at offering our users higher bitrates. I'd like to echo the other comment on-list: seriously consider YouTube. It's free, it works everywhere, and doesn't need Flash. The only reason we don't use it ourselves is that people in our organisation wanted (much) more control of video advertising than YouTube offer. Happy to help with anything else video, just ask :-) John
