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Hello,
All this matter is new for me, so I’m trying to understand if I should upload my videos to Vimeo, Youtube, Bunny cdn or what.I am glad to pay a reasonable amount for a better service and am just starting, so probably I’ll be using a low bandwidth for some time. But I do not want the get mad later moving videos from one service to another. A definitive solution would be much better.
Also I do not understand the relation between fv player and bandwidth: videos are hosted on Vimeo or CDN, the player is a plugin on my website. So is bandwidth passing through my website? Or directly from Vimeo or CDN to the users?
Any help is much appreciated.
Best
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Hello Francus,
thank you for reaching out to us!
No worries. We are here to help you with that.
Each hosting service has its perks and drawbacks in many ways. The question of which is the best choice generally boils down to the purposes you intend to use it for – what type of content (is it fit for use on YouTube?), how much of it and how much do you care about the security of the files.
We will need you to answer these three questions in order to get a better idea of which services might be the right choice for you.
As for the bandwidth, it does not come from your website. It would, if the files were hosted directly on your WordPress. The player is simply the medium though which it passes. It comes directly from the CDN/hosting. The main purpose of a CDN is to ensure faster delivery for viewers anywhere. CDNs are, of course, paid services.
Making the web work for you,
Maria
Hello Maria, many thanks for your prompt and clear response. I repeat you questions with my reply.
what type of content (is it fit for use on YouTube?),
Yes, the content is fit for use on Youtube, in general. It is about the general spiritual principles translated in a modern concrete verifiable language. This is supposed to be more easily understandable by people now. I am not charging anything for that so there are no problems related to getting paid. So why not using just Youtube? Well the main reason I see against Youtube is that I do not control it. They can change their policy at will, they can offer other content distracting users. There may be workarounds to limit Youtube power, but they may change their rules/code to make workarounds ineffective and preventing me to keep users on my website. Well I do not know if these are sound worries or just paranoid issues.
how much of it?
My plan is to produce one 10-20 min video per month, regularly over time. All videos will remain embedded in my website
how much do you care about the security of the files.
Security? Which security risk? I do not worry if my videos are copied and used by someone else. But if you mean that this hosting choice may be important to improve the security of my website, yes, I care a lot.
Best
Also you tube advertising is an issue of using youtube.
Hello Francus,
thank you for clearing that up. So, if I understand correctly – you do not care about video security, but you do care about control and independence.
The security in question is video download and recording protection. As you do not care about having your content copied, we do not need to go into services that provide encrypted HLS Streams and other strong methods of protection.
Therefore, I will omit security intensive options and only offer you options that can give you reliable video playback (hosting + CDN) with an easy workflow. Which after all, are the services you asked about in your first message.
One of the main arguments against YouTube is the low level of security. Second one is the content restricting rules of YouTube. We wish it weren’t so, but your worries are at least partially sound.
As for your worries about distracting users with other recommended content, we do offer a workaround for limiting some of YouTube’s branding and features, including the recommended videos and advertising.Another option is Vimeo. However, Vimeo only allows the use of 3rd party player for users with Pro or Plus Vimeo accounts, so the service has to be paid. Control and independence is a bit better on Vimeo too.
Again, the basic security of Vimeo is quite low, but we do offer a paid add-on that makes it secure, if you’d decide for a more secure approach later on.
A paid service that has security shortcomings, but offers easy workflow with independence and no monitoring on the content you decide to upload there, is Bunny Streams. It is a new feature, for which we are still preparing advanced support, but it should be out sometime this month. The videos do work even now, but we plan on making it a lot more reliable.
Furthermore, you can always decide to use some other hosting+cdn set up, for example DigitalOcean Spaces for hosting and BunnyCDN. Here’s a list of our integrations: https://foliovision.com/fv-player-integrations
Also, if you have some other services in mind, we always take suggestions for new integrations.
Thanks,
Maria
Ok Maria, thank you very much for your very detailed explanation. This helps a lot.
Your Bunny streams suggestion seems quite attractive: control at a reasonable price. Thanks.
Now, lets suppose I choose Bunny streams and then after two years it goes broke or stops working or whatever, so I’ll have to move my videos to another host. Then, will the links to videos (that users already have) continue to work or not? I would feel much more comfortable if links will still work or if there is a workaround to maintain them working.
Do you know where is Bunny streams incorporated/based?
Also you mention Bunny streams connection will be fully operative at the end of this month. Will the FV feature of putting a link at the end of a video be available?
Regarding other services, I am curious about blockchain service livepeer.org which promises control at very low cost. Have you checked if it may work with fv player?
Again many thanks Maria I appreciate your dedication.
Best
Hello Francus,
It is highly unlikely Bunny.net will go out of business anytime soon. In fact, it’s growing by day. However, should anything like that arise, you have the option to swap all the links embedded in FV Player via our Migration Wizard: https://foliovision.com/player/video-hosting/migration-wizard
That being said, if you’d like to go with a strong and reputable longterm player, there’s always Amazon Web Services with their S3 hosting solution and Cloudfront CDN.
While some limitations may apply which is yet to be seen, most, if not all FV Player features will work with Bunny Stream. Links at the end of the video should work even now.
We do not have any experience with livepeer.org. I can ask our development team about their ideas on the network. If you are interested in blockchain based solutions, we have recently added support for odysee.com You can read more about it here: https://foliovision.com/2021/09/odysee-youtube-alternative-hosting
Thanks,
Maria
Hello Francus,
I think you are right, migrating away from Bunny.net Stream might be a challenge – each video URL looks completely random to me, so it’s not easy to figure out which video URL belongs to which original video in your computer if you would have to re-upload them somewhere.
So you would have to get a list of your video names and their Bunny.net Stream addresses using their API or perhaps by asking Bunny.net support for it. Our FV Player Migration Wizard won’t be able to help with that unfortunately as it requires the video names to match in the source and target locations.
I’m not sure if we will be able to fully integrate Bunny.net Stream with FV Player this month, but it’s possible. If you decide to go that way you can already upload video to it using the Bunny.net interface and then use the resulting HLS streams with FV Player even right now.
Thanks,
Martin
Many thanks Maria and Martin,
The worst thing about migration is that user old (pre-migration) links will not work anymore.There should be some way to avoid that. For example I may put one embedded video per page and provide users with the link to that page. So even even if I move from Bunny to Odysee or whatever that page will always contain the same video and the link will be permanent.
Or are there more proper ways to do that?
Hello Francus,
yes, providing links to pages on which the video is embedded is the best course of action. Of course assuming that the links to your website will not change.
The hard part is making sure the videos embedded on the pages will work. Our Migration Wizard is able to help with that for many services. It works by replacing a part of the URL in a bulk.
But as there is no clear structure to Bunny Streams links, the Migration Wizard will not be able to bulk change it and you will probably need to change the URLs manually.
Thanks,
Maria
