Do you allow video uploads on your Discourse forums?

[Remah (Just another happy Discourse user)]

No , for longer videos. Primarily for this very important con:

Handling uploaded videos

Discourse isn’t meant to be a video sharing solution – and there are dozens of very mature and free existing video sharing sites which are video sharing solutions. So the rather complex engineering described above (which would also massively increase your CPU and RAM requirements on the server, by an order of magnitude or more) is unlikely to happen for the forseeable future.

Yes, , for very short videos:

Video player for uploads

It already works this way, try uploading a short mp4 clip and it will work fine, as you can see here: You’re simply going to run into upload limits because videos are HUUUUGE. Upload those clips somewhere that specializes in hosting video and then link to them, like everyone else does, which also provides a built in player …

Maybe, for anything in between.

We’re using Discourse to replace email storage, so we can potentially receive a video attachment which is larger than the default Discourse limit. If we really wanted to keep the video content then I guess that we also have the option to edit it into multiple shorter videos or to keep only the relevant content.

@jord8on

The audience for our forums come from Facebook where almost every post has a pic or video attached

If you read in this forum then it soon becomes obvious that the more your forum characteristics approach a clone of Facebook or something similar then the less appropriate Discourse will be. A really bad example here

Many of the pros and cons of video uploading aren’t going to be the same for every Discourse site. From my perspective, the Discourse limitation on upload size, which you see as a hindrance, are a clear and positive benefit because it helps to prevent my users from posting ephemeral or pointless videos from social media.

I don’t understand what you are trying to do with your forum but I think that the rationale for deciding “Yes” should be based, first, on what is likely to drive success in your forum. Then look at the potential benefits so you’re clear on what you will likely win if you go for it and forego if you don’t. Only then look at the costs. Cost is just another constraint - even when a make-or-break constraint - that I will have to try to manage and overcome.

I guess that if the storage and processing costs couldn’t be reduced enough then I would consider developing or contributing to different solution. Maybe a plug-in to automatically upload videos to a video service so they never get stored in Discourse.

From https://forums.pickleballist.com/ I assume that you mean forums as one Discourse instance/website with multiple “forums” rather than multiple instances of Discourse as different websites. But if I did have multiple Discourse forums then the cost equation probably changes considerably. Video storage configuration would be significantly more complex to setup but would offer greater economies from scaling storage to keep your unit costs low.