I like S3/B2 because the vendor only ever sees encrypted bytes. All decryption/plaintext is on the device. YouTube does not get you there. In fact their entire model is predicated on watching your every move.

As far as Peertube, I don't know enough about it. If I put a massive-bitrate video in some weird format on it, and then try playback on a crappy phone, will it work? If I go through a short tunnel, will it buffer or degrade quality gracefully? I don't want to worry about it.

> S3/B2 because the vendor only ever sees encrypted bytes

Got it, thanks!

> questions about Peertube

I don't know either. So far my experience with existing instances has been rather good but I didn't consciously test the use cases you mentioned. I've wanted to publish educational videos for a while but the idea of feeding the big nasty beast just breaks my heart.

Have you considered just hosting mp4s in <video> tags on a simple web host? I think it'll work a lot better than you'd think.

I actually did try hosting the raw videos first. Playback is kind of terrible when the source bitrate is >20MB/s. You really need adaptive-bitrate streaming.

Thankfully ffmpeg support for DASH and HLS is very good. It’s not hard to transcode, this does all the right incantations. It can take a lot of CPU/time, but it’s a one-time thing.

This uses video.js which wraps <video> and adds a lot more goodies.

You're right, thanks for reminding me of the simple, straightforward way!