this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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I frankly don't see a way for federated video to happen unless uploads are severely limited or it's paywalled. Even with YouTube's wild compression, you're looking at several gigs for a single 4k video.
Honestly the fact that YouTube exists is a miracle. Video is still just monstrously large.
I hadn't dealt with video in years (like 2008) and recently used my Canon R6 to record a few seconds of 4k footage.
After getting over being annoyed at the camera stopping due to overheating after just 5 minutes, I was shocked to see a 7 second clip come to almost 700mb as a raw file.
Indeed video will probably be the last kind of network to see federation. It could take some pretty generous acts of philanthropy along the way to make anything sustainable happen.
Yeah I did a music video in 4k on an A7s2 and the source files, for what ended up as a 4 minute video, were around 100GB.
100 GB ? that's cute. I work in a film production company for advertisements, where the recent trend has been for the crew to return after 3-5 days of shooting, with RAIDs filled with somewhere between 15 and 25 TB of raw data. no fun to store all this.
Well yeah it was a single music video
Wait holy fuck I missed the "T". 25 TB for a commercial is wild
I mean, that's an extreme example. That's way above what on even a 4K BR disc.
I think Netflix is like 6GB for a two hour movie 1080p which is more manageable, but my connection (at a whopping 6Mbps upload) would just about be able to host that for one other person to see.
Modern connections can do a lot, but it would have to be a large peer to peer solution to be back in the hands of the masses. A couple of Linux nerds with a spare server under their desk isn't going to cut it. Realistically, popular videos would have to be on a CDN of some sort, and that ain't particularly cheap at scale.
Freedom isn't free, as the song goes.
I'd happily pay for a federated video service tbh. I already pay for YouTube. I didn't even blink when they raised the price on me because I get so much value out of it
It's simple: don't do 4K. It's absolutely unneeded.
I've never seen any big media content that actually benefits from more than 720p. Among other things, for watching comfortably on laptops. Heck, for most communication / reaction videos, 540p / 480p is more than enough (in those cases the audio is actually more important than the visuals).
I watch a lot of music videos though so I love 4k. Don't know why you're getting down voted though. What you said is true. I don't need to watch a talk stream vod in 4k
Thanks. And it's understandable, I'm guessing most of the people downvoting are the ones who are trying to defend their sunk cost after having bought into a solution without a problem.
That said, there do are valid use cases for stuff like 1080p or 4K (or for, say, >= 120 fps). I just don't think modern "big corp" media, or TV shows, are good examples of it. Like, honestly, what do you want to watch Avengers: Endgame in 4K for? To salivate at the warts on The Hulk's groin?
You're right on that too. Those movies actually look worse in 4k because low resolutions hide the bad CGI.
I have a large collection of 4k blurays for my favorite movies though. Like Blade Runner 2049 and Dune look fantastic. But not every movie deserves the hard disk space.
And still, do you need a 4K video stream for a music video?
I understand wanting higher res audio (which still amounts to minuscule amounts of bandwith compared to the video stream) but I don't get how image quality is important in this setting.
Depends on the music video. A lot of them look great in 4k.
But they still look great in 1080p or even 720p (audio still excluded) don't they?
Not on my TV. The 1080p on YouTube also loses a lot of color data which is pretty noticeable on OLED. On my phone though yeah even 720p is fine.
Yeah maybe I'm not very competent on that with my 7yo cheap phone and 1080p LCD screen (free from someone who wanted to trash it) ^^'
Oh yeah in that case you don't need it
Cannot agree more with this , most screens those are used at homes are good to go with 720p , or at least i fail to see a difference !
Have you considered seeing an optometrist instead?
I wonder when they'll have to start deleting content to make space again. At some point, adding more and more servers probably won't be feasible anymore.
It really is just wild that a service like YouTube is as big as it is and just does its thing.
Currently data storage is dirt cheap because globalised mass production of electronics is a wild thing.
As soon as we get past our current peak everything production at least on copper, rare metals, and petrol (there's more, I'm just not knowledgeable enough) and we start to have to ration things a bit high res video streaming will be one of the first things to go.
And then comes the question, what will they delete first?
Probably old and therefore maybe irrelevant content, but those old videos from over a decade ago are also mostly lower resolution and bitrate and won't free up as much space.
So once that's exhausted, what goes next?
Who will have the privilege to stay on the platform, and who won't? Or in other words, who makes YouTube the most money?
And once that has to be decided, content will be whatever YouTube wants it to be. Which I can't imagine being a good thing.
My guess would be deleting higher res versions of less watched videos and unwatched videos alltogether.
Anyway archiving everything everyone does is - imho - a fool's errand.
Well, time to switch to watching Nebula?
I can't see how it will work for small-time creators though. Or for people who just want to show a video online.
I love nebula too. They're definitely what I imagine federated video would be though. Restricted uploads, and paid. Nothing wrong with that though, video is expensive.
Well, one question is how it'd be paid for. You can't really have a federated payment provider, can you?
So would you have to pay for each separate server somehow, gathering them up like streaming service subscriptions?
Someone smarter than me will need to figure that out. I'm a lowly software engineer, not a computer scientist.
Hey, doesn't mean you can't aspire to be a systems architect :D
You know, make enough decisions that weren't perfect in the long term and you'll learn something! ...totally not speaking from experience, no.
Not to sound like a crypto bro, but this is literally the biggest benefit of cryptocurrencies, easy transfer of money between people wallet to wallet, and you can choose your exchange to exchange the money between crypto and cash.
Unfortunately crypto bros absolutely ruined crypto for everything it could've been
Yeah, that's fair.
thats what I thought too - until I actually signed up for Nebula. It took me a week to exhaust every creator I wanted to watch.
No regrets because I do enjoy the content, but their catalogue is absolutely tiny compare to youtube.
Yeah, I was being a little tounge-in-cheek there.
I was actually thinking about what it would take to have a truly peer to peer video site. Have clients simultaneously consume, serve and transcode content. It would obviously be concentrated in the hands of big enthusiasts and small video companies, but presumably it would be similar to the fediverse where you can choose from many instances.
problem, the way I see it, is that there are wayyyyy more devices that cannot transcode and do not have the storage to maintain a cache, than ones that do. And the ones that can do so for a large number of clients are expensive to run. Much more expensive than stuff like lemmy. It'd be hard to form that kind of ecosystem.
Is size really the issue though? I can torrent more than I can store on my hard drives.
Seems like you could build a video streaming service on that. (Actually I think some people already did this.)
Well that's exactly what peertube does to distribute the load of serving the videos
Yeah it is an issue. I archive my 4k blurays and they chew through my hard drive space far faster than I can get new hard drives
Lbry does exactly this. Actually it works way better than the last time I checked it out. I'm guessing they have invested in a centralized storage solution because I'm encountering basically no missing videos and extremely fast playback which wasn't the case the last time I checked them out a few years ago