Everyone's been talking about needing good YouTube alternatives that works for them, so I wrote up a guide where its solutions would be hosting videos on Internet Archive or storage space services and embedding them to static personal websites.
It's not meant to be a tutorial on making "platforms", but for making a space for your own videos.Be cautious that these free sites are not meant to handle thousands of videos regarding the bandwidth and storage. I would probably recommend encoding yours to smaller sizes and/or using a paid service. Use them with care please.
Free services:What it says on the tin can. Has a lot of music, applications, literature, and even videos people can upload for preservation. You can even add multiple videos and other files in an item, almost like a playlist.
Free video hosting service. Though the compression on videos under 1080p is pretty bad.
Actually improved a lot more than I expected, even got rid of the bad instances. Now includes mobile apps. Can be hosted by yourself or Fedihost. Yes, this can make platforms for others to upload, but it can also just be for only you and only your videos.
Paid services:CDN for video streaming + 250gb for $5 a month, and 2 cents per additional GB.
1 TB for $4/mo. Is slow since it’s mainly for backup storage, but it does work well. Make sure to pay before the monthly deadlines.
Cloud storage offering $6/TB/mo.
250 GB for $2.99 / month. Has worse contact service though.
Hosting your own server as an option:Get a burner computer to hook up to a storage and use your home connection. There are a few open-source services I can recommend for getting a storage VPS and a self hosted CDN such as
SeaweedFS or
Garage. It may be more than setting up an SFTP or Rsync then copying the file over to a designated folder but it works.
Adding the video to your website:The next thing to do is to embed in a video. Just as easy as pasting this in your HTML file. You can use and modify it if you need to.
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/Free_VJ_LOOPS_created_with_THRILL_SERIES_11" allowfullscreen></iframe>
There’s other options such as changing the video size and whatnot: width=“640” height=“360”
I use iframes for easy embedding, you can also learn more about video stuff here.
Adding similar featuresIf you want your video pages to have social functionalities similar to YouTube, there are ways to do so. Comment widgets can be easily placed onto the pages. It doesn't work for new Neocities users though, unless you get a Supporter plan.
And for “monetizing” your videos, Linking to your Kofi, Patreon, or any donation system works. Plus, it allows you to have more creative freedom compared to YouTube so you don't have to sponsor shady products nor bleep out swearing.
Adding recommendations is easy as making simple links on video pages or somewhere else. There's also the option of using webrings to connect to others’ websites who host videos. There are various resources on making one that you can look for.
Another cool thing you can setup
If you
really need to make your website look like YouTube,
MediaCMS does the job very well where it gives you the familiar UI you need along with support for video, audio, image, and PDF. It even allows subtitles and more.
I hope this guide helps you. You can share this with others if you like.
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