YouTube alternatives?
YouTube alternatives?
The thing I need that I currently use YouTube for is a place where I can store long, large videos (think around 2 hours). I want to be able to link to these videos, and disallow anyone who doesn’t have the link from seeing them. I have a lot of personal videos at this length and at a much shorter length that I want to be able to keep saved both for myself and to be able to share with various friends and acquaintances. YouTube has filled this need and still does, but I’m looking to move off of it. I’ve looked at some alternatives and few of them worked out for me because they don’t support long/large enough videos.
I'd go for PeerTube, personally. LBRY/Odysee would also do the trick, but it tends to have a lot of far-right bullshit on it, as well as being built around crypto.
To be fair, LBRY seems to be one of is not the instance where using a Blockchain actually makes sense. I'd agree with you entirely but the currency was very freely given from just participating so it never felt scummy like the rest of Bitcoin does. Each video is staked with currency but it's just for the actual intent of the Blockchain, which is proof of existence. Surprisingly it worked pretty well in theory and in practice, as for users it was easy to view worthwhile content (until it got co-opted) and for creators it was reliable since it's delivered P2P. I was always worried that a creator would get spammed with claim requests by people, but it never seemed to happen which was particularly surprising.
Basically, if I upload a video I'd put down, say 10Lbry to make the stake and hold it for me. Theoretically someone could just boot me out and price it at 1,000Lbry but it just didn't seem to occur. It may just not have existed long enough for it to become a problem.
None of that really matters though because like you mentioned it got really heavily infested with the wrong crowd. Anti- everything but fa. :( It was really sad to see it go from small content creators moving away from YT to conspiracy vaccine political disinformation disaster.
I'm not on LBRY anymore and haven't been since the Odyssey rebrand, but with the SEC fine it seems not many will be for much longer anyway lol. I'm no fan of crypto but I think LBRY did have potential at being a decent YT alternative. Maybe it's naivety but I never got the sense that they were using crypto entirely as a trend but as an actual application. Especially given that it never got over $2.50, I just feel like there'd be more effective ways to scam than to create a video application just to scam?
Is peertube safe? Is there porn on it? I looked around and it seemed ok but I don't wanna send someone a link to my upload and something dicey comes up next to it
Have you checked out PeerTube? Or Odyssey (however they spell it)? Or LBRY?
LBRY's dead. Some crypto securities nonsense. SEC fined them to death.
Odyssey is/was a LBRY client.
Also strongly discourage peertube; it's a massive pain in the ass to maintain. I'm not sure how useful an AP video service is to begin with, but you can do it without being that awful at it, surely.
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If you want privacy and control over who sees your stuff, I'd look into storage platforms that support live video playback, rather than video platforms. And if you have a LOT of videos, you'll likely end up paying a small amount per month.
If you're sharing videos that don't have any copyright concerns or issues, then something like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box should work.
If you want something FOSS, I'd say you're limited to self-hosting with something like NextCloud, OwnCloud, or SeaFile. A more plug-and-play (but not FOSS) self-hosting option would be a Synology NAS.
A lot of my videos get copyright concerns and get flagged on YouTube because there’s copyrighted music playing in the background, or it’s me or a friend performing a song. We’re not some cover band doing this for money, it’s literally just us doing it for our own pleasure and maybe sending it to a few of our friends. Whether the song is in the public domain or not, it always gets flagged. Part of why I want to move off is because I think this affects whether I can redownload my video or not. I’ve been using YouTube as a place to offload videos for awhile, so I probably won’t be able to redownload a lot of my videos.
I really don’t think I’m in a position to self-host. Thank you anyways!
Ah I was afraid of that, having copyrighted music will make things a little more difficult. I know Google Drive scans for that type of thing, not sure about Dropbox or Box. You could try Mega.io or another non-US service that doesn't care what you upload.
Honestly, the breaking point is the mild inconvenience I experienced today where I hit the video upload limit. I’ve got 9 videos I shot today that I need to upload, it only let me do 7. I could have gotten around this by filming everything as one or two continuous videos instead of 9 separate ones. I didn’t because I’ve never run into the limit before and was unaware it existed until today. I wanted to have them all up to share with my friends today (they do have a playlist link that the videos go into, but I wanted them all available today), but I have to wait for 24 hours 😒
You could use onedrive/Google drive and share the video via a link. They both have in browser playback.
Maybe Odysee is able to meet that purpose, maybe not. However, maybe you can use Jitsi to 'meet' your friends instead of posting private videos for them. Not sure if that's possible for you and your peeps, but it's there.
Otherwise the best solution I know of would be to self host because unless the service has some strange way to pay for server time (like Odysee's, which I don't exactly understand or Youtube's, which is selling identification tags of your mortal soul), you will always run into the same issues you've been having.
I haven't personally set up a personal server ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°), but I want to at some point. There are of course drawbacks in that you'll have to set it up and maintain it yourself (with help from internet strangers), but at least you can do whatever you want with it.
https://cyberhost.uk/getting-started/#hardware
https://www.howtogeek.com/846979/heres-why-self-hosting-a-server-is-worth-the-effort/
Also, you can use freecycle to hopefully get a used computer tower that's still capable of being a tiny server. You'll possibly have to get yourself and older gpu to make it work though, which can be had on ebay. I would get anything greater than or equal too a 750 GT (NVidia) or R7 260 / 260X (AMD), or maybe something a bit newer so you don't have to worry about it turning to dust when you first start using it.
Good luck!
P.S. A lot of the right-wing conspiracy crap on Odysee can be found in the "lifestyle" and "education" sections. There are still some great channels like Louis Rossman, 3Blue1Brown and ElectroBOOM. Just the ones I know of. I suppose Odysee isn't the best for finding new channels...
I've seen people talking about using YouTube for personal video storage (not home personal, just fuck-you personal). Video on something you don't want to lose? Download, reupload unlisted/private and keep it forever. It's effectively free cloud storage through Google?
I know it's the opposite of de-googling, but it's also a pretty effective screw you.
Then you can just self host Piped and use it as the frontend and give piped links out instead of YT ones.
Free video storage, granted through Google, but with minimal given to YT due to lack of advertising from said stored videos. And theoretically, with self hosted Piped you'd not have to worry about buffering or stability - it's just your instance that you're sharing out. (This is just referring to me personally using piped.kavin.rocks and piped.video and sometimes the pages or videos not loading very quickly. I believe self-hosting it would mitigate that)
What is “fuck-you personal”?
As in: fuck you Google, you're never going to be able to monetize this in any way and don't include it in your search results.
I'm sure Google is happy to put up with the small minority of people with private videos for their own use because they still get metadata from the uploads and plays.