Thanks for your effort in finding and listing all these for people who really need it.
However, for the issue of sustainability of video posting in general, I do think that we need to "scale back" our thinking quite a bit. I'll offer my rule of thumb:
In the realm of personal websites: if one is not making money off his video works (i.e. professional); then he should cut down his posting of video media to the bare minimum that he could comfortably host on his own site, serving regularly to reasonable audience count, projected for the site's estimated growth for at least 5 years forward.
Video may be the most "friendly" edutainment consumption format for the
unwashed masses; but it
is a format with the worst ratio of information offered vs. (giga)bytes transferred. Actual juices of
many informative
videos could pretty much be reduced into article with images, sized 100 times less than the video version-- and some of which can even be reduced to text without image (sized 10000 times less than video version).
Granted, there are
several things that cannot be (adequately) presented as words and stills, like choreographed music videos, evidence footage, or live demonstration of equipment or software--
then by all means,
use video; BUT only for specific bits that absolutely need it, and
do the rest as writing (and photos) as much as possible. Like instead of doing a whopping 30-minute video essay showing the equipment around and how to operate it; write most of that in text, with pictures showing relevant angles discussed, then
show each actual operations
as one (or few) half-minute video clip(s). The data needed for the whole thing would be reduced 20 to 50-fold, even that the piece was still using videos.
These are perfectly serviceable, and people did these 2 decades back in the past; they just stopped doing it because they then realized they could externalize the cost of videos to "free" video hosting services like YouTube
(0)...
^ Just like back when many of us externalized the cost of liberally-sized images to "free" image hosting service like Flickr, Photobucket, Imgur, and many others in the old days; which we all know by now on how they come back to bite us in the @$$ later on.
And speaking of the cost, there is also one elephant in the room which people often avoid speaking of:
the cost of HD.
I notice this, because I'm one of the "older" people who have been surfing Internet
before the era of ubiquitous Internet videos: which for this discussion, I'll draw the line marking the
start of that era at the time YouTube first offered "HQ" playback option... the
option that is known today as the "360p" video resolution.
This has been
the first "watchable" Internet video resolution, ever.
(1) Before that, they were just blocky eyesores.
But one thing that set me apart from other Internet video viewers is that I ignore
tech industry's number-racing gambit; what's being good enough is enough. Fast forward 17 years to today, when I go watch Internet video someone sent me a link or ones I dug from my to-watch list... I set it to 360p, like I have always done.
And yes, I do this even when the screen in front of me is being a photographer-grade full-HD IPS/LCD 23" monitor
(2); because that's
Just Good Enough (TM) for nearly every informative
(3) and entertainment video I have ever watched (and archived).
(4)Why this matters?Look at
the file size: a
4-minute H.264+AAC full-motion professionally-uploaded YouTube
video in 360p resolution would land around the ballpark of
15 MiB per video (or less, if the video got less movement).
^ In the realm of personal websites nowadays, that's not much at all;
posting a few-minute video in 360p resolution is basically in the same league as posting a high-resolution image on your website-- not big deal. Do it this way and you will still have ample room to post (hundred+) more videos in several years to come; all without relying on external service, ever. So
if you absolutely need to post video on your website, you should only do so in 360p resolution.
(5)And when you encode your video minimally like this, if one of your article-with-video got HackerNews'd today --a problem that some people deem "
nice to have"-- it would likely be able to hold out okay as well.
(6)On the flipside,
if you bumped up the resolution (7) even to just 720p (not even the more-common 1080p "full-HD", or heaven-forbid 2160p "4K");
the self-hosting situation would simply become... dire.
When we're escaping from the grasp of large-scale technology conglomerates and do things ourselves, it is important to
reconsider which parts of our technology uses were essentials-- even if they look quaint and boring, and which of them were frills-- even if they were extravagantly-dressed and widely-hyped; in order to spend our now-limited resources efficiently, on things that actually matter
in getting the point across.
In any case, in the realm of small Internet and self-hosting, I ask you to
think trice, before choosing to "pivot to video".
(0) Which such platform also now realize they couldn't shoulder the cost forever, so now there comes massive data collections, supercharged tracking,
anti-adblocking, start+mid+end-video unskipable ads, and viewer-abusing
hyperpersonalized addiction engineering to milk, squeeze, entrench, and monetize every eyeballs to the last drop. Karma is unforgiving, you know.
(1) A 16:9 video clip in 360p resolution will fit on 640x480 VGA monitor and NTSC CRT TV
unscaled; meaning that resolution-wise,
it is on-par with looking at your favorite 16:9 DVD playing letterboxed on your old 4:3 TV set.
(2) A catch is you ought not to use dog-terrible video players which did just the "bare-minimum" bilinear-scaling of video up to the HD resolution output-- they would definitely look quite a bit of blurfest in such cases.
(3) Granted, it do take
a bit of production consideration to produce videos which remain "legible" and useful at that resolution. The solution need not be high-tech, for example: a well-known videocaster Clive Mitchell would "zoom up" on the circuit board by putting its
full-page photomacrography printout on his desk. (Having been watching his videos exclusively in 360p, I assure you: they are
very legible)
(4) Also bonus point that no one in my family could ever blame me for slowing the Internet down for the rest of my household... because I barely use any, even back at the peak of my YouTube "addiction" in the late 2010s.
(5) This also sidestep the entire set of chores in having to recode+post multiple resolutions of video. With 360p being
THE single resolution you provide in this scheme
(8), any visitor who got enough bandwidth for any sort of video would be able to view that with no problem.
(6) But it would not hold
if content-laundering robots hit you; even sites without video
can and already went downhill with those. So
ready your nuclear weapons if you found them coming your way.
(7) 480p or 576p (i.e. DVD-resolution) clips
might be feasible without leaving the selfhosting realm; but you ought to be really careful about using that.
(8) I think that for self-hosting, most webmasters would opt for a single
codec as well; which means single video file to rule them all. I won't judge you (much) if you used H.264+AAC in .mp4; even if all browsers I have won't play them. But if you ask what I'd use, I would use VP8+Vorbis in .webm (or Theora+Vorbis in .ogg for less-complex videos) which are royalty-free codecs that have been supported by virtually all browsers (except ones from proprietary overlords named Microsoft and Apple of course) from the dawn of original of HTML 5.0 specification.
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