video hosting performance: local vs youtube/vimeo/etc.

[superboyac]

There are certain educational video clips i want to organize and put together in a website (wordpress).  Youtube is difficult because their contentid is so aggressive and most anything gets taken down.  Is there another host with a less aggressive system?

Also, how come locally hosted videos have such poor performance compared to the youtubes and such?  can it be fixed?  that is, is it possible for a locally hosted video to playback on a browser or mobile without too much headache?  every time i try, there are always problems...it won't start, you have to press play like 5 times, buffering is super slow or nonexistent.

[Shades]

Sounds like bandwidth issues to me. Usually the bandwidth from a residential internet connection is geared towards downloading of data. For uploading only a fraction of that is available to you.

Furthermore, video requires very consistent upload capabilities and residential connections aren't usually not optimized for that. That is where very different priced business connections come in.

Also, making sacrifices in video resolution will improve playback speeds. Downgrading resolution will show you the capabilities of your connection.

Getting a business connection is not a guarantee either. You can optimize all you can on your end, but if your ISP doesn't (too much overbooking, software settings and/or hardware) it is still in vain. Besides that, your telecom provider might also throttle bandwidth if you are in a place where the ratio of phones and antenna's isn't optimal. And with big businesses paying your (telecom) provider to get priority on bandwidth... 

There are so many points of failure in getting local hosted, high quality video to work, especially on phones. The only place where watching a locally hosted video through a browser on a phone is on your own local WiFi network...but then you might as well watch it on a monitor.

[Jibz]

I think they also re-encode your video, to get smaller files in a (sub-)format better suited for streaming.

[superboyac]

locally hosted:
http://tbgentertainment.com/uncategorized/video/

vimeo
https://vimeo.com/89162926

Do you guys notice a difference?  I do.  vimeo plays perfectly.  the locally hosted one sometimes flickers a lot, sometimes pauses to buffer, sometimes you need to press play multiple times.

[mouser]

The local one paused to buffer a lot for me too -- of course that is not because it's local per se -- but rather a reflection of the local server's performance weaknesses and the bandwidth limits of its location.

[superboyac]

The local one paused to buffer a lot for me too -- of course that is not because it's local per se -- but rather a reflection of the local server's performance weaknesses and the bandwidth limits of its location.

How can I make it faster?  other than getting a private server option, that is, which is way more expensive.  shouldn't i have enough bandwidth to play smoothly once in a while?  I've never had good performance on videos i've locally hosted...and i've tried at least 3 different web hosts.

[Jibz]

It looks like the video is encoded at around 12 MB/sec, and from my computer I am downloading at somewhere between 256 kb/sec and 512 kb/sec from your server, it should be obvious that there is no way this will be smooth.

For streaming, I would make a web-optimized video file at no more than 2 MB/sec (I don't know what software you are using, I often use use Handbrake for recoding).

If you don't want to place it somewhere with more bandwidth than your own server, you might have to go even lower, but the quality will suffer.