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Hello, we are a online academy for photographers and recently moved all of our videos from a vimeo VOD account to a private server, and we use the PRO version of your player on our wordpress based site.
We having a few issues after first days of offering VOD with this new system. The main one is Many apple users ( computer with safari, iphones and ipads ) complain that when they go forward on a video, it looses audio. So if you watching a video and let it run, it works fine, if you let it run and then move back and forth on it it works fine but if you go forward before that part has been watched before, it would stop the audio.
Do you have any clues about how to fix this? is killing our apple users.
On a diferent side of things, we also lost the hability to “serve quality depending on bandwith of enduser” like vimeo, youtube, and netflix do. This was automatic obviusly on our vimeo account and we are wondering whats the best way to implement on our new server.
Is the best way to export diferent qualities and use the quality selection option on the player? or is there any automatic ways to do it with 1 high quality source? cse we read something about coconut but not very clear how it works. For us having now to re-export low quality versions of all of our videos will take a lot of time and dont want to do it unless there is no other way.
Thanks in advance!
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Hello Jonatan,
how did you move your videos out of Vimeo? Did you just download the source MP4 videos?
Please use the Video Checker tool in FV Player to send us a report of such video: https://foliovision.com/player/basic-setup/how-to-use-video-checker
FV Player Coconut lets you encode and encrypt the video for optimal streaming from slow mobile internet to fast connections and even get the video timeline thumbnails. It would really simplify this for you, you can see the process involved in encoding a single video here: https://foliovision.com/player/securing-your-video/encrypt-videos-directly-wordpress
Thanks,
Martin
Hey martin, thanks for the quick reply.
we had the source ourselves and we uploaded it to the new server so we didnt “take them from vimeo” but re upload the source.
Video checker gives no error. Its not just one video but most of them seem to give troubles on ipad iphone and mac.
I seen the coconut thing, but can we use it while videos are hosted on our own server? or we need to use digital ocean? as we have a 1tb video library and we used 70tb of bandwith last year, so thats why we moved out of vimeo ( price was too high and our own server allows us much more )
thanks
Hello Jonatan,
if these are the source MP4 files, then they are probably not optimized for web use. Since iOS 13 the iPhones do have issues with some MP4s due to some issue in the HTML5 video engine of the device Safari browser. We found it might be related to the 50i fps, but didn’t find a way of detecting that in our video checker unfortunately: https://foliovision.com/support/player-pay-view/bug-reports/unable-to-play-videos-on-iphone-11
FV Player Coconut gives you the complete video workflow with DigitalOcean Spaces used for video storage and BunnyCDN for fast distribution of the videos.
It wouldn’t be hard to let it load the videos from your server as the source material and the only store the encoded videos on DigitalOcean Spaces.
We do have a version running with SFTP to allow video storage on a VPS server as well, but it’s a separate paid addon which we didn’t release yet.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi martin thanks again.
we will check this issue with the ios videos, but it sounds about right.
Im not so computer savvy to understand fully what you mentioning about the workflow with digital ocean bunny cdn and coconut, do you care to explain for a newbie?
So Digital ocean would store the “versions” of our video with lower quality and the top quality would be still on our server? and about that paid addon.. how would that help us ?
thanks and sorry for my ignorance
Hello Jonatan,
DigitalOcean would store all the versions of the video what would ever be served to the end-users. Together with BunnyCDN it’s very cost effective.
The BunnyCDN traffic is priced at $0.005 per GB: https://bunnycdn.com/pricing -> Volume (8 PoPs) So for 70 TB it would be $358. I’m not sure how that compares to your server, but it’s a lot cheaper than when using Amazon AWS.
The special paid addon for FV Player Coconut would let you store the videos on your server and even serve it directly from there – but I would still recommend to use BunnyCDN together with it. You would have to implement come more advanced content protection though to ensure nobody is downloading videos straight from your server though.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi there,
thanks for your answer again.i seen the prices of bunny cdn are more than reasonable, im worried about the digital ocean storage price.
our server does many more things for us so would be great to keep that.
This addon you mention, is there any way we could use it already? maybe helps you test it :)
also this would serve diferent qualities of videos ? or thats something else?
On a last side, we still have the issues with apple devices and its not the kpbs of the video but maybe more related to what you mentioned on the other post about the moovs, how can we fix that?
thanks
Hello Jonatan,
FV Player Coconut does create the different video qualities – from 4K to 240p which you need for users on slow mobile internet.
Fixing these MP4 videos would require some effort which is comparable to using FV Player Coconut to re-encode the videos which also gives you the benefit of timeline previews and you can opt for the video encryption too.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for writing. You wrote:
1tb video library and we used 70tb of bandwith last year, so thats why we moved out of vimeo ( price was too high and our own server allows us much more )
Vimeo should be a flat fee of about $200/year (pro account) for that amount of storage and serving. Did Vimeo try to make you pay overages?
Vimeo alternatives: we set up the FV Cocounut plugin with the most cost-effective hosting partners possible. Digital Ocean Spaces is as inexpensive as bulk hosting comes, about 10x cheaper than AWS. BunnyCDN is 4x cheaper than any other CDN available to smaller clients (not Warner, Apple, Pepsi, etc).
The plugin is free – our contribution to the community and an attempt to make Coconut.co which is a great service more accessible. If you’d like us to set up a custom script on your own hosting, we would be happy to do so. To set up a custom pipeline, add some sample content and train your team to use would be $500. If it’s just storage on your own server and BunnyCDN, we could implement this particular configuration for $300.
Please let me know what happened with your Vimeo hosting in more detail if you could. Thanks!
Hey thanks
yes vimeo is messing with us. they said we are in the 1% of top accounts ( we were paying about 1000USD per year for the top account ) basically if you go over 3tb per month you are on that 1% acording to them and they asked us to pay 7000 USD per year ( basically paying per GB instead of a flat rate ) so we decided to go on our own server .. our idea is to migrate the lives too and quit vimeo for good.
Those 500$ would allow us to serve the videos in multiple qualities depending on the client conection, have them encripted ( while allowing for download when we want to use the source link ) and give them to anyone arround the world without issues depending on where they connect? i assume is basically the same thing as digital ocean but without the digital ocean side..
do you know how much is digital ocean? i only see the 5$ plan but thats not enough storage to put all of our content and its not enough bandwith either…
Hello Jonatan,
the videos encoded with FV Player Coconut use the HLS format, so they are not so easy to download. If the videos are also encrypted it’s impossible to download them without cracking the algorithm first.
If you also allow your users to download the source MP4 files, then the encryption doesn’t make much sense anymore, as they can already downloads these MP4 files. Unless you offer that as a special paid option.
You said you have 1 TB of videos. The based price of $5/month for DigitalOcean Spaces gives you 250 GB of space. For the other 750 GB you would have to pay $0.02/GB which is $15. So you would only pay $20 for the storage.
With traffic it’s a little bit more difficult –
I checked one of the websites which we run in similar setup – it has 1,5 TB of videos and the BunnyCDN traffic is 22 TB. The traffic from the video storage to BunnyCDN is 3 TB.
So in your case they have 1 TB of videos which might use 1.5 to 2 TB of DoS to BunnyCDN traffic. 1 TB of that is covered in the base $5/month price, the other 0.5 – 1 TB would cost $5 to $10/month.
And for 70 TB/ year = 6 TB/month you would end up paying $30/month to BunnyCDN as the price there is $0.005/GB.
By using BunnyCDN you get faster video delivery and a lower price than using DigitalOcean Spaces alone.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi martin thanks a lot for the detailed answer.
This is definetly cheaper than our own server, and maybe it was a better decision than having our own server ( we pay something like 250 per month for it ) but in the future im sure we will appreciate our own server for other things, from lives to hosting our site etc..
If we go with our own server instead of Digital ocean we can get same functionality? i mean our server would send to bunny cdn but that would convert directly to HLS using the coconut or we have to create those videos with HLS format ourselves?
anyway, how can we talk further about the part where you can create the conection between our server and the CDN / coconut? can you write me an email?
Hi Jonatan,
Thanks for sharing the Vimeo experience with us. It’s a far cry from the “Unlimited” Vimeo promote in all their marketing materials. I’m surprised Vimeo did this to you when you were already on the top tier. Happily FV Player Pro is there to come to the rescue. Situations like this is why we made FV Player Pro platform agnostic.
You can go with Digital Ocean spaces for storing the video (not your website, just the videos, actual serving takes place mostly from the CDN) or you can store them on your own server. The costs as Martin pointed out are not high. If you’d prefer to store them on your own server (after your recent experience I can understand why), we’d be happy to help you set that up for $300 with BunnyCDN as the CDN. We could also write and run a custom script convert your entire video library for you via Coconut.co as a service for another $200. Otherwise you can easily add the videos one by one yourself.
As a general rule, instead of going with a dedicated server, you could probably go with a smaller VPS from Linode or Digital Ocean (about $80/month version should be enough) and store the actual videos in Digital Ocean spaces. Both solutions should work well, provide excellent security and both are much less expensive than any dedicated video CDN, whether Cloudflare video, Flowplayer or jwPlayer CDN.
Let us know how we can help you with your migration.
Thanks, Alec
