Implementing an mp4 player on one's own server

With UK internet making its glacially slow progress, years later I am within reach of getting FTTP (fibre to the premises). For 40 quid a month I can get 90mbps down and 30mbps up.

So, on a fixed IP, one could run one’s own video server, obviously without a storage limit. With HD (1920×1080) looking reasonable at 5mbps (the Vimeo throttled bandwidth) so long as there isn’t any, ahem, rapid action this would support 6 concurrent downloads, which is probably plenty for any flying video, unless it is a crash…

With something like a Synology DS216 network drive, £130 for the empty shell, plus say £200 for two 2TB drives, one just needs to open port 443 in one’s router. The DS216 has a video server, AFAICT, or one could rig up an old PC doing that. To do this properly one needs to have server-side code which implements a video player (the thing with the Play etc buttons).

And with FTTP you can ditch the BT analog phone line because you no longer need it for ADSL, so you recover more or less the whole cost by saving that. Have to move one’s landline to VOIP.

Not sure if you are joking

There is indeed a community of mostly young people who live just on the mobile phone, but this works only if (a) you have a good 4G signal at home, which much of the UK doesn’t have outside cities (we have almost no GSM reception at home, for example) and (b) you are happy to use the phone as a wifi hotspot for a laptop etc, or don’t have any computer (have no real interest in writing much, for example, which again is very much the trend). Or you can bottom-feed from somebody else’s wifi These people pay loads for this lifestyle – check out some Iphone X tariffs…

It also doesn’t work well for a business which needs a decent corporate image (yes I know there are ways around that, with a geographical number ported to VOIP etc but they are technically beyond most people), plus most businesses need to do written comms…

Also 4G tariffs are expensive. Typical household ADSL monthly usage, without watching movies, is a few tens of GB. The performance is crap too, with a long latency. The best deal I see currently is 100GB for £20/month but it’s a low performance network. The better ones are ~40GB for £25. And no fixed IP.

In the UK and most places, you need a landline to get ADSL. Unless it is over fibre and the fibre goes all the way to your house in which case (in the UK) you don’t need a landline contract. I don’t think many people have realised this…

If doing this (public video streaming) one has to open a load of ports in the router, which on a quick look are 1900 (UDP), 5000 (HTTP), 5001 (HTTPS), 9025-9040,
5002, 5004.

BT have moved at the minimum possible speed, due to their monopoly position. However, competition in this sector is meaningless. It is like having multiple electricity providers…

4G will never be able to compete with fibre laid in the ground. The bandwidth is orders of magnitude smaller, the packet latency is orders of magnitude longer (largely due to the distributed tower architecture), the maintenance (operating cost) is orders of magnitude higher… the GSM networks are not making much money these days, since the EU ban on most roaming charges.

What is interesting is that it is now, finally, becoming possible to do your own public video hosting.

In the UK you always get a voice line if you order a landline, so may as well have a phone on the end of it. And if you order the landline via e.g. Vodafone (instead of BT) then you get the voice line plus pretty good ADSL, for £21/month. But at ~10mbps UP speed, not really good enough for hosting videos.

Once I get FTTP (January 2019 hopefully) I will test it and report.

I doubt I will implement this video serving myself however, because of the security risk. One can just never be sure that it doesn’t open a way to hacking the internal network.

There is still the ultimate weakness: all the packets end up on the internal LAN and if there is a device on that LAN which can be exploited (with malformed packets, etc) there’s a nice attack vector.