Note: I may be slow to update the post title with the current goal progress, but these badges should be automatically updated:

TankieTube is holding its first ever fundraiser! stonks-up

If you’ve found the site of value, and have the means to do so, then please consider becoming a sustaining member through Liberapay! catgirl-happy It’s our preferred method.

https://liberapay.com/TankieTube/donate

We’ve set an ambitious goal of $150 per week, which would cover ~90% of the current server, bandwidth, and storage costs.

Liberapay currently doesn’t support one-time donations, but you can effectively make one by signing up and then cancelling your subscription after the first payment.

Other ways to make a one-time donation, for your convenience:

1) PayPal/Venmo/Credit/Debit [No anonymity]

Pros: Simple, fast, no account creation required

Cons: Your name and address is revealed; it’s not private and anonymous like Liberapay

2) Monero (XMR) [Ultimate OpSec]

8AaqRrPGfzPfGmZbmBc43WQ4BEnTBujbKiNrMcCZWXKo84LfhH8hysNZxV6JhvESmp2XueM4nHg9J6tLf6pKpbH4KH6dTR4

Pros: Untraceable: Neither I nor Liberapay will know your identity. Can bypass sanctions.

Cons: Complicated

What is Monero (XMR)?

The majority of existing cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, have transparent blockchains. Transactions can be verified and/or traced by anyone in the world. This means that the sending and receiving addresses of these transactions could potentially be linked to real-world identities.

Monero is the only major cryptocurrency where every user is anonymous by default. The sender, receiver, and amount of every single transaction are hidden through the use of three important technologies: Stealth Addresses, Ring Signatures, and RingCT.

If you buy Monero on a public exchange such as Kraken, then transfer it to a private wallet you control before sending a payment.

  • moh [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    thank you for everything you do to keep tankietube going! unfortunately, i don’t have anything to help with the costs but i can definitely be more selective in what i upload.

    slightly unrelated question if that's ok

    i noticed that since the update, the search function defaults to searching the “vidiverse” rather than tankietube’s specific instance. is there a user setting i might be missing to have the search function default to our instance?

  • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    Thank you for running TankieTube!  I’m wondering, could we save you on costs by deleting old movies from watch parties, or is storage not a big part of the ongoing cost? If deleting old movie night films would help, perhaps we can organize a way to redistribute / decentralize it.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      Storage is about half the ongoing costs.

      If the movie is bad and you have no intention of ever watching it again, then I suppose you may as well delete it. On the other hand, having a large library of quality or rare content is a boon to the site, so please keep anything that’s good and well-organized/labeled. Deleting videos also deletes their views from the global views counter, which makes me slightly sad.

      A lot of the storage bloat is due to “abuse” by users unrelated to Hexbear and has resulted from my failure to crack down and set a reasonable policy, so don’t feel guilty.

      As for redistributing/decentralizing videos, that may be possible but I think it may be too complex to justify the benefit. It would require me first to migrate from BackBlaze to a custom storage server and configure PeerTube to serve videos from the filesystem instead. That’s something I’d like to do anyway, but once the capital is expended for it, the ongoing storage costs will be pretty low, which greatly reduces the relative benefit to decentralizing the videos. It would also require other people to setup and maintain a high-availability web server.

    • Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself]@lemmy.encryptionin.spaceEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      If you didn’t see TankieTanuki’s comment down below:

      Videos storage is $6.95/TB/mo. The site stats say it has 36 TB of video ($250/mo), but the BackBlaze bucket actually holds 63 TB right now ($440/mo), partly because I’ve been retaining the deleted videos for fear of accidentally losing content through an error (I recently shortened the deleted retention period to 30 days, so it should drop off by a lot soon), and partly because unlisted videos aren’t included in the site stats.

      The server with bandwidth and traffic upgrades is $339.76/mo, so yes storage is a big part of the cost, in fact over half of it right now. But also, at just $6.95/TB, you’d probably have to delete a number of videos before you would see much of a difference. I mean, I have a copy of nearly 2 hour stream which only ends up taking up 2,8 GiB, even if I said it took up twice the space[1] (6GB) it would require ~166 of them to get up to a TB. Of course, if there is something that is truly not needed anymore, do delete it, over time it adds up.

      1: It’s a greenscreen stream, so it might be more optimized than other vids, that’s why I’m doing this.

      ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      Transcoding is the reason I got an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D dedicated server ($221.83), mainly because I have a power user in Russia who publishes a lot of videos and he kept wanting faster publishing turnaround time (his content is relevant and he has a fair number of viewers, so we’re on good terms).

      Videos storage is $6.95/TB. The site stats say it has 36TB of video ($252), but the BackBlaze bucket actually holds 62TB right now ($441), partly because I’ve been retaining the deleted videos for fear of accidentally losing content through an error (I recently shortened the deleted retention period to 30 days, so it should drop off by a lot soon), and partly because unlisted videos aren’t included in the site stats.

      I recently upgraded the bandwidth to 10Gbit/s with 100TB traffic ($117.93), because it was bumping up against the default 1Gbit/s and 35TB traffic limit.

      Don’t feel guilty about using the site though. I can always downgrade the services (and cull the unrelated videos by non-Hexbear users) if it comes to that. I’m not going hungry anytime soon.

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          Half a year?

          So mesh is a P2P internet? I’m just now learning of it. PeerTube uses P2P streaming by default, but it only works for peers watching the same video at the same time.

          • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            0·
            10 days ago

            cpu or 20 tb drive cost around 500 bucks or thereabouts no? or is not a monthly price?

            yeah, say i’m willing to supply 2 tb and a thread on a home server to some peertube instance, well i can’t do it, not in anything approaching sane way

            • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
              0·
              10 days ago

              Oh, I see what you mean now.

              Yes, it would be cheaper to buy hard drives and a server in the long run. I have the skills to build one as well.

              My only concern is that colocating a server in a local datacenter would doxx my location, and colocating one in a far away datacenter would make it difficult for me to replace hard drives and maintain it. But that may be worth it in the long run.

              • Majestic@lemmy.mlEnglish
                0·
                10 days ago

                And you have good reason to be careful on that given what happened to bayarea and the increasing crackdown as well as the money zionist groups can throw at trying to ruin anyone showing the truth about their genocidal behavior. Stay safe comrade.

                Though I have to wonder how much of that storage is used by old hexbear watch night media and how much couldn’t be cleaned out say 4-6 months after watching finishes to alleviate storage costs a bit.

      • ByteFoolish [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Are you making use of HW accelerated transcoding or just software? I’m not familiar with PeerTube but it looks like it supports it but is something you need to manually configure

        When I was building a Plex server with some friends we ended up going with an Intel CPU because of the performance of the hardware transcoding with Intel QuickSync Video, which at least at the time outperformed AMD. We were able to go with a cheaper CPU instead of trying to brute force it through software. Obviously, widely different in scale from your operation though

        You’ve probably already researched this, but I wanted to mention it just in case so you could improve performance and or save money

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          0·
          10 days ago

          I’ve considered GPU acceleration, but I’ve read that software is vastly superior in terms of quality for encoding video, and so for a video archival website that made more sense to me. I haven’t personally done any benchmarks or comparisons though.

          I plan to add my home server as a remote runner for more transcoding power. I used it briefly in the past but encountered a technical bug (it may have been fixed in a recent software update). A downside to using remote runners is that it bloats the network traffic[1], so it makes sense to make the localhost as powerful as possible.

          1. If someone uploads a 1 GB video to the server which gets transcoded locally, it consumes 2 GB of traffic once the files are uploaded to object storage. If a remote runner is used to transcode the same video, the server hands it off to the remote and receives it back again, doubling the traffic to 4 GB ↩︎

          • Majestic@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            10 days ago

            Is there any way you could make it user selectable? Or grant it on a per user basis based on needs? I suppose not.

            It’s just I don’t think movie watch night uploads of Batman and MLP really need the same care as uploads from combat zones or from resistance fighters or communist content creators and re-encoding them using GPU acceleration makes sense as long as you use a reasonably slow preset (still very fast on gpu acceleration).

            Both Intel QSV and NVENC are quite good and even AMD’s implementation while considered behind and inferior to those too wouldn’t necessarily be so bad that most Hexbear movie watch night users would necessarily notice given we’re talking about a less than 800 pixel window on the side of cytube on 1080p monitors. Though I admit my only experience is with NVENC, QSV, and software encoding.

            Warning technical rambling

            For archival purposes I would definitely recommend software encoding where possible. I use it myself for my own collection of definitely legally acquired major films and TV shows because it results in:

            1. Smaller file sizes (maybe 2-10% difference) for the same quality which in longer term storage scenarios can indeed matter
            2. Higher quality

            And because I’m re-encoding from already lossy encoded bluray and at times web type sources reducing the amount of degradation via repeatedly encoding something is important to me because I’m watching it on a big TV.

            Though when we’re talking about software encoding generally there’s a big difference between medium/slow and slower than that presets and things like fast, ultra fast, etc. Medium and below, especially slow really get you the best results with drastically diminishing returns for slower, very slow, placebo settings. They’re the best balance of quality speed settings which is why many quality p2p type groups use them.

            If you’re doing very fast encoding using software then at that point the difference between that and a slower preset run on NVENC or QSV (intel) isn’t a very wide gulf as faster presets are also less file size efficient compared to slower ones and lower quality.

            I think personally if I was in a situation of needing to do fast or especially higher than that (faster) encode presets via software that I would consider whether I couldn’t for no additional money or less money switch to something that can utilize NVENC at slower preset. Obviously keep in mind storage costs and test to see what file sizes you get out of a few different types of test files to see if it might represent in the long-run a storage issue before making a change like that.

            • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
              0·
              10 days ago

              Is there any way you could make it user selectable? Or grant it on a per user basis based on needs?

              It would require writing a custom plugin for PeerTube. It’s something I’m very much interested in doing, but it’s slightly above my current skill set.

              PeerTube uses the veryfast ffmpeg preset which leaves a lot to be desired IMO, so you may have a point about NVENC or QSV. I’m an AMD fan though 😕.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Yeah alright, i use it too much not to chip in. Will throw some coins at it.

    Edit: Phone’s dead. Can’t verify payment provider lol, will do it later though.

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          0·
          5 days ago

          I made it in Kdenlive.

          About the Outro

          The music is La Danse Des Bombes, a great song about the ecstasy of armed combat in defense of the Paris Commune of 1871, which I discovered thanks to comrade exotiquematter@tankie.tube. PT is French software, so I think that’s neat.

          The sound effects are sampled from a video of the Al-Qassam Brigade resistance fighters in live armed combat against Israeli occupation forces. The sound effects correspond to a :hamas-red-triangle: scene in the video.

          Underneath it all is a 140bpm beat by “K1 The Producer”.