I will be starting a new project soon. The details on the type of site etc are not important, but it could be thought of as a website similar to facebook or linkedin, where the users have profiles and such.
An important feature is video upload and playback. For my project to be successfull I would have around 10,000 users at first, at the minimum to have a profile on this site, each user will need to upload 20 short videos. If all goes well the project will be rolled out further and the users number might get a fair bit larger.
The thing that worries me here is the cost of the server bandwidth, of which I want to keep as little as possible. This coupled with the difficulty of a “from scratch” appraoch for a video upload feature makes me think it would be best to use a third party tool. But I have a few requirements to meet:
- Users can upload videos as “private” so the videos are not available to view by everyone.
- Those private videos can then be shared with other users.
- The video can be embedded in the users profile page.
- A user should not be able to follow a link from the embedded video on another users profile and then contact them through the third party video providers website.
I know those requirements are quite specific. Any answers you have to solve my problem will be greatly appreciated.
If the third party video upload providers make use of “Premium” accounts to remove some restrictions … this is fine, so long as the cost of that service would not outweigh the cost of just paying for the bandwidth in the first place.
yep,
use kaltura http://www.kaltura.org/
It has all the features, is free and open source and has a community of competent developers to draw upon.
theres a tonne of extensions for further functionality and it’s easy to write new features if you can do a bit of php.
If you would rather spend money for peace of mind the biggest player in this game is BrightCove who have a VERY configurable system as well as a bunch of easy API style interfaces to make new stuff:
http://developer.brightcove.com/en/
Next don’t rule out Youtube’s API http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html
you can always use youtube to carry the bandwidth burden if you are worried. I’ve yet to see youtube’s site go down and it will allow you to do most if not all of what you’re after.
And finally. Ive built video applications where users can do what you are saying. Ive never found bandwidth to be a major issue. We did once have a problem when the client had a huge campaign and there were thousands of hits to a few videos and it peaked but then we updated the code so that it ftp the encoded files to a CDN (i don’t track CDN prices but last time I made a system like this Highwinds was the most effective and Akamai was the best but waaaaay more expensive, Highwinds worked a charm no issues at all). The CDN actually brought the whole server costs down and increased bandwidth ten fold. The key to ‘rolling your own’ is ffmpeg on a unix server, it can transcode any format input to a perfectly encoded web video.
On top of all that you can use a streaming server to deliver content once uploaded and transcoded which will reduce bandwidth again and give you a few bits of extra functionality. I have to say this bit was always a pain in the ass, I’ve used Red5 for this in the past as well as Adobe Flash Media/Communication server (they keep changing the name) however the Adobe option costs a LOT.
If you want any source code (or even an entire php/unix/ffmpeg/HTML/CSS system) give me a shout