A Self-hosted, video streaming player that lives in a web page?

November 12, 2024 11:42 AM

For "reasons" (including SUPER-sucky customer service), I want to ditch my paid streaming media player service. Lets call it...JillyWillyPlayer. My sites have been using it for over a decade. I don't need hosting and I'd like to find a more...2024 solution.

I already host all my video files and they exist only on my server. I have my own bandwidth et-al. All I'm really paying JillyWillyPlayer for is the streaming media player that is inside my customers' desired browser.

I don't need a library system (have my own), or a 3rd party server (again, I host all my own and my own bandwidth), I don't need anything that will serve an ad, all I need really is the web-based streaming player.

Click the link ->new window opens with the player in it with the indicated video ready to stream (i.e. not download).

I was looking at Jellyfin and OpenStreamingPlatform but im not sure I need/want ALL that these can do, or if they just do the one little thing i'm looking for.

Free isn't necessary. I'm willing to pay a license or a one-time purchase thing.

Any thoughts, advice or recommendations, gang?

posted by sandra_s to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

The video tag sounds like what you want? Jellyfin, for example, is for people to maintain collections of tv shows, movies, etc. and stream them to different laptops/computers/tvs they own, and mostly provides an interface for managing and streaming their collections.
posted by sagc at 11:55 AM on November 12 [3 favorites]

Seconding that hosting a simple video player in a web page is a problem solved very elegantly with the built-in HTML video tag, which is supported by virtually every browser in existence. That said, this documentation assumes you know how to write HTML; without more detail around specifics in your hosting situation and comfort/ability to hand-edit HTML, this may or may not be useful information, other than to understand that there's literally no reason you should be paying a subscription for this.
posted by Aleyn at 1:16 PM on November 12

I use plyr for this purpose at work. It's free, but you can donate if you're feeling grateful.
posted by axiom at 1:17 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

The video tag should do what you want, but depending on your video length/quality you may want to reencode your videos for different resolutions/codecs. If you don't want to go through the hassle of doing a bunch of resolutions/formats I would suggest at least encoding to webm, it's well supported and ~70% the file size of h264/mp4 at the same image quality. (AV1 is tempting, but it's not as well supported though, its file size is ~45% of h264/mp4 at the same image quality!)

Haven't seen plyr before looks super cool!

I wrote some code a few weeks back to encode an input video into 1080, 720, and 480 a using several codecs and the code automatically adjusts the bitrate to try and hit a certain quality level. It's a bunch of python running ffmpeg, memail me if you want the code.
posted by gregr at 1:42 PM on November 12 [2 favorites]

Playing a static video in a static website is very easy using HTML5.:
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:43 PM on November 12