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sync/docs/raw-videos.md

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Raw Videos / Audio

Want to host your own video/audio files for use on CyTube? For servers with the ffprobe module enabled, CyTube supports this! However, in order to provide a consistent experience, there are limitations.

Hosting the File

CyTube requires a direct link to the file in order to query it for metadata such as duration and encoding. The website where you host the file needs to be able to serve the video directly (rather than embedding it in a flash player/iframe/etc.). It also needs to serve the correct MIME type for the video in the Content-Type HTTP header, e.g. video/mp4.

I don't recommend hosting videos on Dropbox-type services, as they aren't built to distribute video to many users at a time and often have strict bandwidth limits. File hosting sites such as Putlocker also cause problems due to being unable to serve the file directly, or due to binding the link to the IP address of the user who retrieved it. For best results when using raw video, host the video yourself on a VPS or dedicated server with plenty of bandwidth.

Note that CyTube only queries the file for metadata, it does not proxy it for users! Every user watching the video will be downloading it individually.

Encoding the Video

Current internet browsers are very limited in what codecs they can play natively. Accordingly, CyTube only supports a few codecs:

Video

  • MP4 (AV1)
  • MP4 (H.264)
  • WebM (AV1)
  • WebM (VP8)
  • WebM (VP9)
  • Ogg/Theora

Audio

  • MP3
  • Ogg/Vorbis

If your video is in some other format (such as MKV or AVI), then it will need to be re-encoded. There are plenty of free programs available to re-encode video files, such as ffmpeg and handbrake.

For best results, encode as an MP4 using H.264. This is natively supported by many browsers, and can also be played using a fallback flash player for older browsers that don't support it natively. Always encode with the faststart flag.

Subtitles

Unfortunately, soft-subtitles are not supported right now. This is something that may be supported in the future, but currently if you need subtitles, they will have to be hardsubbed onto the video itself.