How to deal with video in 2025

[joe_g]

Hey all,

My projects involves more and more video. For a couple of years I've been self hosting mp4's. It works okay but it's always a hassle with determining the bitrate and getting the clients to understand that kind of thing. I don't want to go back to the bad old days of embedding. Mux.com looks good, but then all video material is locked up in their servers and it's hard to move. I don't love the idea to be tied to them forever.

My dream would be to have something similar to image->width(500), such as video->bitrate(3000) for 3mb per second, for example. So that the editors can upload whatever video file. I think this would be not that hard to achieve with ffmpeg? I've been toying with the idea to do something like this myself. Anyone else?

J

 

[joe_g]

One strategy would be to store all the original video files on the website as file uploads, and then use mux for conversion and delivery. At least then there a pinch less of a lock-in. Then, maybe at some point there might be a self-hosted mux alternative (or I make one based on ffmpeg). That could be a way to do things?

[wbmnfktr]

I guess this article could be helpful:

https://screencasting.com/cheap-video-hosting

More details about the Cloudflare R2 pricing:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/

Edited Tuesday at 09:30 PM by wbmnfktr
added link to R2 pricing docs

[IslaPerry]

Thank you so much for sharing the article.

[joe_g]

Interesting! I didn't know about HLS and doing it myself doesn't seem too bad actually

[JayGee]

We use Bunny CDN for an increasing number of projects - it’s cheap and reliable.

Planning on making a module when I get a chance too to enable upload to their CDN from inside ProcessWire.

Although I think this may already be possible via ProCache - not had a chance to check yet though.

[bernhard]

2 hours ago, JayGee said:

We use Bunny CDN for an increasing number of projects - it’s cheap and reliable.

Would be great if you could share how you use it. That's probably easier/faster than creating a module and could also be helpful/interesting 🙂 

[JayGee]

11 hours ago, bernhard said:

Would be great if you could share how you use it. That's probably easier/faster than creating a module and could also be helpful/interesting 🙂 

There’s not a huge amount to tell (currently), we’re using it in a very simple way.

So if a client needs a lot of video on their site we’ll provision a library for their site in our Bunny account rather than using Yotube embeds (or similar). We then embed videos to the site using a ‘video block’ in repeater matrix with the video loaded by its Bunny ID.

Specifically we use Bunny’s stream platform which provides encoding to multiple formats/resolutions/sizes for different devices, analytics, geolocation options, customisable player etc and then optimised delivery to the site visitor.

At the moment video upload is manual via their dashboard, however they have a full upload API hence the plan to explore doing this via a module soon.

They do provide things like edge caching, DNS and a standard CDN too (I believe Stream is built on top of their CDN) which I why I think it could be used with ProCache. I’m just not sure if you go down this route how you simultaneously achieve the benefits of the stream player etc - I still need to test this to determine if a separate module is needed or not.