Hello Gordon, I've just installed Peertube onto my VPS and set up an instance. However, I have found it to store far too much cache too the disk than I would like. I had a quick look around and stumbled upon Mediagoblin (https://mediagoblin.org). I might try this. Best Regards, William Wright Callsign: M6WIQ Web: https://www.m6wiq.uk ---- On Sun, 31 Jul 2022 15:02:46 +0100 Gordon Pearce via BitFolk Users <users(a)mailman.bitfolk.com> wrote ---

Something that impressed me in recent years is native support for streaming mp4 within browser, provided the codec used is nothing too exotic. You could have a very simple page with a folder (or tree, as required) and a basic front end web page. The front end web page could be static (hard to maintain for lots of videos) or written in a simple scripting language (PHP would be my choice, but there are plenty of options) which would simply parse the file tree, follow the structure, and show links to videos laid out in a nice (or as nice as you have time for) interface. Then, the user would simply click on any of the video files, and assuming they are mp4 they will stream to the browser and can be very easily watched by the user, no plugins/addons or flash viewers required. This also has the advantage of sharing the source file, and assuming you are sharing with trusted family and friends and have no wish to restrict them, I would think they would appreciate (I know I would) the ability to right click on the links and download the source mp4 files so they can watch them later or on other devices. I appreciate that this does not support multiple bitstreams for low bandwidth viewing, but again, if a user on a slow link can right click and download the file, wait an hour, and watch at full resolution from local source, my vote is that this is a better end user experience than being forced onto a chunky low bandwidth stream. Back in the day when YouTube supported it, you could queue up several videos in tabs and wait for them to buffer and then watch them at your leisure - the modern system allows no such thing. I also appreciate that you may not be willing to code an interface for this, but it will be an excellent project for a beginner. Maybe there is someone else in the family keen to get into programming? As an experienced programmer, I assure you it will be dead simple to do: just use a recursive function to parse the folder tree, find files with .mp4 extensions, and keep track of the folder depth so the HTML+CSS can indent the display for the user. The visual display can evolve over time and could start out very basic (just <p> tags) and become fancier as required/desired. If you are adventurous then you could also support thumbnails and different bitrate streams. The way I would do this is to process things once, offline, rather than expecting PHP (or similar) to handle video nicely on the server. I would use a Linux command line program to convert the entire video collection to a low bandwidth format, and then store it in a separate (but same structure) file tree alongside the master copy. Likewise for thumbnails. Finally, if you are on Apache (I know other servers also mimic this behaviour) you can easily restrict access using .htaccess directives and credentials stored in .htpasswd. Writing a login system using sessions is probably not realistic for a beginner (but prove me wrong! I absolutely encourage coders to get into this stuff) but basic HTTP authentication has been standard in all browsers for decades now, and for small user groups works exactly as advertised. Anyway, just my $0.02 and best of luck with your project. I hope your family appreciate your efforts, I'm working on digitising the family photo archive at the moment and at times it can feel like a thankless task. Kind regards, Ash On 31/7/22 20:30, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users wrote: -- --- Ashley Norris ashley(a)norris.org.au ----------------