Trying to put large video files on my website and having difficulties.

  • Resolved 2rascallyrabbitsbusiness

    (@2rascallyrabbitsbusiness)


    2 years, 7 months ago

    So I’m in the process of building 2 websites. Both of which are very video oriented. I have lots of content already recorded in 4K resolution which I plan on putting on both websites. Here is the issue:

    1 website I can offload the content to youtube and embed the videos in so they can stream at any resolution even at 4K to any device. The other website however the video files have to be self hosted. I upgraded my hosting platform to a virtual private server with considerably more power behind it. Getting the 4k videos to play in 4k is difficult even on desktop but I can get them to work (Slight delay). On mobile however I am struggling to get them to work even at 1080P HD. They will play but only after a long delay in loading.

    I have tried the following:

    6 different video plugins including ones that are supposedly ‘Responsive’ mobile friendly. Allegedly it detects your stream speed and delivers a lower resolution version to the mobile device. I’m still not clear if I’m having to do something to make that happen or not. The documentation sort of implies it’s automatic.

    I have tried compressing the videos with just about every combination using handbrake. Web Optimized is on. I’ve tried multiple H264 encoders and the slowest compression speeds it will handle. H265 won’t work on mobile browsers so is not an option.

    I’ve been using 1 video for all my testing and it is sourced at 4K just a little over 1 gig in size and so far Handbrake has been able to get it down to 80Mb at best at 1080P. Even still huge delay (~1 minute) in getting the video to play on a high powered Android phone. That same phone by the way can easily play back 4K videos from any website with no buffering or delays (As soon as I hit play at 4k on youtube the video is there with not a slight bit of buffering).

    I’ve attached my handbrake screen shots so maybe someone can give me some advice on what to do to improve things. I don’t expect my videos to perform as well as the instant play 4K youtube videos but it would be nice to get it to at least a decent speed on my website at 1080P.

    Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Can my webhosting platform (Hostgator in this case) do anything to help?

    Handbrake screenshots

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • The other website however the video files have to be self hosted.

    Why?

    What’s the SPECIFIC reason(s) why the video files “have to be” self-hosted?

    I have tried the following: 6 different video plugins including ones that are supposedly ‘Responsive’ mobile friendly. Allegedly it detects your stream speed and delivers a lower resolution version to the mobile device. I’m still not clear if I’m having to do something to make that happen or not. The documentation sort of implies it’s automatic.

    No, the plugins do NOT do what you think they do. “Responsive”, in this sense, simply refers to the physical dimension (width and height), and not the quality or resolution of the video.

    What you described YouTube does… and which you’re attempting to do, is called adaptive bitrate streaming. And, as the name implies, you need a proper streaming media server to do this… not a web server!

    Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Can my webhosting platform (Hostgator in this case) do anything to help?

    Your problem is that you’re trying to use a web server to do what it’s simply not designed for and cannot do. You need to setup a media streaming media software along with the appropriate media encoding hardware to adaptively serve lots of high-resolution videos to users.

    Unless you’re going to jail if you don’t host your videos locally, I wouldn’t bother. But if you must, here are some of the software solutions on the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streaming_media_systems

    Other than that, do what the rest of us do: use an external video streaming service. YouTube is free, and their “Unlisted” option serves most use cases. If you can’t have YouTube’s branding on your videos or need a higher level of protection for your videos, Wistia or Vimeo PRO should cover your needs.

    Good luck!

    Thread Starter 2rascallyrabbitsbusiness

    (@2rascallyrabbitsbusiness)

    I appreciate the feedback. The one websites video files cannot be hosted on YouTube because they are an adult in nature. I will talk to you my weather’s provider and see what they might have to offer.

    Thread Starter 2rascallyrabbitsbusiness

    (@2rascallyrabbitsbusiness)

    So if I were to host my video files on something like bunny.net and just link back to them just like I was going to with a YouTube video, that should work right?

    It should, in theory, but I’ve no experience with bunny.net. I see they have a 14-day free trial, so you could test out their Bunny Streamer video streaming service to see if it serves your needs.

    Thread Starter 2rascallyrabbitsbusiness

    (@2rascallyrabbitsbusiness)

    Ended up going with bunny.net to fix this.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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