Are self-hosted videos a good idea?

I was wondering if I should use a service like Vimeo or instead choose to host my video on my server ? I built a family website: it's password-protected, not indexed by search engines, etc. It would be nice to have videos there too but I can't decide which way to go.

Self-hosted videos

  • Respect privacy
  • I have plenty of space on my server (65GB)
  • But I am concerned about bandwidth (they say it's unlimited but...)
  • and about usability and ease of access for my family (they're not techies). They can't really use FTP and compress a video.
  • Not sure there is a really good plugin for it

Vimeo

  • Easy to add videos and get the embed code
  • We can set a password for videos
  • But I don't want to go Pro
  • And you can't get HD quality with embedded videos.

As I said, plenty of disk space, supposedly unlimited bandwidth but non-techie family. I guess we'll want to display videos from few seconds to 5 minutes max. But those videos may be in HD. Which way should I go ? Any plugin recommendation.

Thanks guys.

Topic vimeo videos Wordpress

Category Web

1
answered at

This is rather subjective but here is my view.

I have built video galleries used on public and private servers. I use Miro for compression in open source formats and video.js to support embedded viewing. Miro does a great job of minimizing bandwidth consumption. video.js has been more than adequate; I consider it a very good module. Together, they avoid stepping on copyrights of commercial vendors.

As an aside, IMHO public services like vimeo are great but not a wise choice for copyright protected intellectual property. Is your family info, images and videos "intellectual property"? Well, yes, I suspect it is until someone puts it on facebook et al.

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