Thoughts on self-hosted youtube alternatives

bgstack15 — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 12:41:04 GMT

The whole topic of self-hosted youtube alternatives is rather scant on the Internet, which surprised me.

I found a nice web-based yt-dlp frontend! I have a single Docker server for other purposes, so it was nice to play around with this metube. Ultimately it wasn't better than running yt-dlp in a terminal and dragging links into that command to append the url to the command.

And for the viewing frontend, I tried https://git.mills.io/prologic/tube which sounded so promising! The video upload operations never completed for me. I think it was trying to encode the videos (transcode?) but it never actually populated the web page with contents even after ffmpeg stopped running.

So I then tried MediaCMS which I really, really wanted to like. It's a Django (python) app, which I have no experience with. I was unable to get this reverse-proxied behind Apache httpd under a virtual path (or prefix, i.e., https://example.com/media/). I gave up and then used a different port number, so all the traffic on port 1285 went to the application. This one worked with uploaded videos. I had to change a few settings in the deploy/docker/local_settings.py:

MINIMUM_RESOLUTIONS_TO_ENCODE = [240, 360, 1080]
USE_X_FORWARDED_HOST = True
SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

The last two are the bog-standard Django reverse-proxy instructions that deal with https. This is needed for any proxying tasks. I removed my manipulated STATIC_URL, MEDIA_URL, and FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME components which never actually completely worked.

The MediaCMS web presentation looks slick. With the 1080 minimum resolution (which ended up producing a file twice as large as the 1080p files I uploaded), it was acceptable. There is even a little button over the video for "Cast video." From a mobile browser, the cast failed to send to my Chromecast. From a desktop's chromium, it did work to cast to a Chromecast. It started as screen mirroring, and then it asked me if I wanted to send just the video.

So the usability was missing a little bit.

And none of this was actually better than Jellyfin, and also just visiting the files over nfs, except the awesome youtube interface. The quadruple files per video was a little excessive but storage is cheap these days, right?

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Thoughts on self-hosted youtube alternatives