I’ve been researching for a few days about what would be the best (was looking for free but then I realised it’s not going to happen, so just the cheapest/cost effective) way to have a SELF HOSTED Video on Demand platform, that would allow flexible access models for users ( subscriptions/rental/purchases ), for videos, but also audio and ebooks (no drm or transcoding services needed). Something like filmdoo, cinesquare and so on.
How good of an idea do you think it would be to use Kaltura as a starting point ?
I managed to find no VoD services made with Kaltura, and no such pre-built offer to buy from Kaltura itself. Are there any ? If so, how much does it cost ?
As a possible solutions I found magento2 to be a candidate, with some added coding to handle the specifics of media streaming. Found this nice vod site that uses magento: flimmit dotcom (cannot post >2 links so i edited it)
Another candidate would be jellyfin, which unfortunately lacks conditional user access per title and any payment integrations. But has native apps for android/ios and a very nice looking UI. Probably a bad idea without more conditional access support from the core code.
Or just build everything from scratch.
What do you think ? I am looking mostly for unbiased opinions from people that have nothing to sell to me personally. (except a Kaltura product, of course).
I tried to install kaltura itself on ubuntu 18.04, using the automated script, but it failed. First it complained about some invalid signatures:
W: GPG error: (removed linked cause I can’t post >2 links) propus InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: 8118B7B578D4BA50032E3B740E221B84C95650AB
The best approach to use Kaltura in the format of video on demand (VOD) would be to join as a Roku Developer. Normally you can upload and Kaltura would transcode on the fly as a flavor, now technically after you provide a description, a tag and category it would allow you to syndicate as a Roku feed but over the last update this function appeared to have been damaged hopefully to be fixed in next release. So how to get around the problem.
Here are the steps I used to use get my channel up.
1)Download a copy of “Json File manager” https://github.com/rrirower
I used an older release because I have windows 7, so the last supported version for me is 2.0.21
2)Join or Sign into your Github account, here you can upload your .json
In all honesty .json files have endless abilities for categories, tags and videos
Assuming you created or signed into your Github make sure you create a repository.
Now click on the gear on the top of the page and scroll down there is a choice to create a theme for “Github Pages” this will create a static page. This is part of your readme.md file.
This is my static page
Scrambledbliss is my username and Bliss is my repository name
Now watch close how this works
/feed.json
If this were the name of your json you have allowed it to be ingested as a live feed.
3)Join or Sign into your Roku Developer Account
As a newbie, I would suggest you choose the path of a “Direct Publisher”
Based on the need of the product you would choose “Manage Channels” and “Add Channel”
Here we make it easy pick the country and language and finally
paste your feed and submit. Assuming you did it right, Roku has ingested your feed and you are ready to build the layout.
Still an open issue, have not solved it yet, and if someone can provide a little more detailed guidance on how to implement such a thing, I would be grateful. No idea what 3/4 of the things you talk about are @john_hilla, could not even get kaltura to install with the automated script… Will try the install again soon I guess.
i am also researching kaltura CE to use as a VOD service
in my understanding it could serve as a replacement for e.g. vimeo
i plan to have a frontend app (laravel base) for user management / roles / permission / subscription
it would speak via api to kaltura
in my understanding the commercial kaltura offerings are built using this approach (no laravel… but that doesn’t matter for the argument)
thats at least my view/motiviation … to develop most comfortable i am researching to have a docker based installation that allows to quickly spin up a ‘test bench’ for development
but for now the progess is slow (due to time i can spent on it). The installation problems on deb based systems are indeed off-putting… however the centos based installation worked in my case flawlessly
We have just done that. Kaltura CE is the base of our VOD service serving up to 50 million reproductions per month.
The first thing you need to take into account is the scalability of your setup. You need at least a DB cluster, API cluster, Packager and transcoding clusters, CDN and external storage.
@david.eusse thanks for the info, but I’m not aiming for that scale. Maybe 5000 per month, so many orders of magnitude lower than what you have. Not even looking at making a profit but just breaking even with this project. I will use just one rather powerful machine and a 1gbps upload connection. No CDN needed as it’s language-specific content, and even with people from abroad, 1gbps is enough to feed them all (also planning to use torrents/webtorrent or just use a cheap bandwidth service like seedboxes if things happen to get too hot).
Can you share more of your setup and development process ?
If you are serving only 5000 reproductions /month, I suggest to follow the instructions and me careful with the correct ssl certificates for Apache and Nginx.
Apart from that, using the API is only a matter of RTFM and understanding how kaltura works.
We have been using Kaltura for many years as a platform for low cost / large setups. Our setup was able to handle up to 50M plays /month serving more than 6PB of data.
The main issue is scaling up safely because of the inherent design of it (Apache, php, mysql). It’s difficult to provide more details but yo can contact me directly if you want.