How crazy is it to handle video uploading in-house? Assuming that moderation is a non-issue for our use case, I'm talking more about handling large uploads, converting to web-friendly formats and presenting a video player. Right now we have a Vimeo integration for this but clients don't like to pay for another service on top.

We are using AWS and they do offer media transcoding solutions...

AWS transcoding is not cheap. With large enough amount of video DIY solution will be much cheaper.

at a previous company, we had servers running ffmpeg to do this. it was a huge maintenance burden, though. staying on top of all the codecs, different resolutions, triaging failed conversions (when someone uploads crap), etc. but yeah, definitely cheaper than AWS (ignoring that maintenance cost)

Oh I haven’t realized that AWS is so expensive. Perhaps for large volumes it is, but the elastic element is very appealing.

Ok so to much the Vimeo pro plans, you get 100 minutes per month on AWS. Plus you have to pay for storage and bandwidth. Hmmmm

We used to do video transcoding with ffmpeg on our servers but as mentioned, the setup was very complex and maintenance was hell. We switched 6 months ago to AWS MediaConvert and are now happy users. The price is not bad if you don’t use Pro tier features or huge resolutions.

@valtteri does it also come with a video player or do you only get a file in S3 that you need to somehow serve to clients? so you also need to figure out a CDN and some nice interface to do adaptive bitrate and so on...

Does not come with a video player. We use some open source player. Also we cut corners a bit and transcode “one size and quality for all”. It works in our case well enough. If customers want premium we allow embedding vimeo/youtube as an alternative.

AWS has a good story for serving private files through S3 and CloudFront with signed urls.

Our customers want to control their data so a lot of them will soon migrate to MS streams which infuriatingly still doesn’t have an API or any way to upload videos externally so everyone is frustrated.

Having an in house option would help clients not deal with a Vimeo account. We actually integrate also with TwentyThree but that is even more expensive.