I have a decent amount of video footage that I’d like to share with friends and family. My first thought was Youtube, but this is all home videos that I really don’t want to share publicly.
A large portion of my video footage is 4k/60, so I’m ideally looking for a solution where I can send somebody a link, and it gives a “similar to Youtube” experience when they click on the link. And by “similar to Youtube,” I mean that the player automatically adjusts the video bitrate and resolution based on their internet speed. Trying to explain to extended family how to lower the bitrate if the video starts buffering isn’t really an option. It needs to “just work” as soon as the link is clicked; some of the individuals I’d like to share video with are very much not technically inclined.
I’d like to host it on my homelab, but my internet connection only has a 4Mbit upload, which is orders of magnitude lower than my video bitrate, so I’m assuming I would need to either use a 3rd-party video hosting service or set up a VPS with my hosting software of choice.
Any suggestions? I prefer open-source self-hosted software, but I’m willing to pay for convenience.
Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex will all detect connection speed, adjust quality settings, and transcode the media to playback without buffering.
I wouldn’t recommend Plex. They’ve been steadily moving away from self-hosted private media servers and towards just serving comercial content to you.
I myself run Emby as I’m rather fond of their development team and their attitude towards privacy. It does require payment for ‘emby premier’, ie the installable client apps and transcoding features, but it has single payment lifetime licenses as well as monthly.
Jellyfin is a popular open source option that is built on a fork of Embys older open source code before they went closed source.
Either would work for you.
