Hi - My team is using a private Discourse forum right now, and we’d like to embed videos in our forum. However, we want to keep our videos private so we don’t want to host these videos on YouTube or Vimeo. Do we have any alternatives? Thanks

You could launch your own video server or pay someone hosting fees to run one for you. I was running my own video server for awhile that I launched, managed, etc, but since it was more a toy than it was useful, I decided to save the $50/month I was paying for the VPS and took it offline. If you launched Discourse, then you probably know your way around Ubuntu, so you could probably run your own server. You would manage the server as you would Discourse, with a proper load balancer, CDN, etc. Are you expecting high traffic?

For a small private community you can increase the max upload size and upload those to Discourse. There are some things to consider: videos consume a lot of space so you will want to setup some form of block storage (s3 and the clones) and CDN if you are putting those in a s3-like bucket you could even bypass uploading those to Discourse and just put em on the bucket and oneboxing Be careful on the codecs to ensure your video can be played everywhere You said the videos need to be private. Uploading videos directly will allow people to right click and download the original. Not sure if that will be a problem in your application.

Hi, You can use Vimeo for your private videos so that they don’t show up elsewhere. It’ll work for you if you’re ok hosting the data on Vimeo. Check this out: Video Making Tools for Creative Professionals

Thanks all. To answer a few questions: We’re looking at about 500 users on the forum. We would like to avoid taking the user out of the forum to view the video. Therefore embedding is a must. @Destry_Hunt - What does it take to launch our own video server?

It is not hard at all to launch PeerTube. (GitHub - Chocobozzz/PeerTube: ActivityPub-federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in your web browser · GitHub ). Those instructions will take you step by step. If you do not want to be taken out of the forum, though, I cannot remember if PeerTube will render for you within the post. I like PeerTube because since you run the instance yourself, you can be an outlaw and post videos that are too taboo, offensive, and triggering for Vimeo or Youtube, like patriotic or religious videos. That would be funny if it wasn’t true these days. Let me know if you run into trouble setting up your instance.

[image] Destry_Hunt: I cannot remember if PeerTube will render for you within the post. [image] Big Buck Bunny Big Buck Bunny (code-named Peach) is a 2008 short computer-animated comedy film by the Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation. Framatube was embedding just fine

Oh Good. I imagine Peertube will probably do the same in that case. Too bad I destroyed my Peertube instance a week ago!

how do we enable video uploads? right now it only allows pix.

Permit the file extensions and raise the upload file size limit.

got it. also, is there a way to instead of uploading video to just point to it so that a member can use their username and password to view it but no one outside of the forum can?

How to embed private videos?

Product Support

merefield (Robert) December 4, 2019, 7:39am 14

Why would you want to prevent anyone viewing a publicly available video on YouTube or Vimeo?

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