Hi guys,
I thought id actually start and use Storj for my real world storage needs! I wanted to share a large video with someone so thought id use the link share feature.
Before anyone bashes me for the size of the file…I don’t think that should matter.
Im getting really bad performance playing this. Any ideas?
Thanks!
I tried to play it on my iPhone 11 Pro Max from Germany (1Gbit/s Wifi) and it’s not even starting after 3 minutes 
I just looked at it as well. I also cut-pasted the URL directly into my browser just to see what happens. @will.topping I take your point about how the file size shouldnt matter. I do have a couple questions though - since I assume the video is playing smoothly for you when you test it locally, Im gonna guess this isnt an issue with the videofile itself… have you also seen this behavior with other video files? or is it isolated to this particular file ?
I’m mentioning this to some of my coworkers as well, incase anyone has insight. Thanks for taking this ride with us and being an early adopter – and also for reporting in on issues so we can see how its behaving in the wild!
Same here the video does not start for me in the player at all.
There’s got to be something wrong with that link. Absolutely nothing happens when I click it, so it’s like the performance is constrained by the network, it’s fundamentally not working at all…
For me all controls are greyed out even after waiting for several minutes
direct link:
https://link.eu1.storjshare.io/s/jxbuggi6o7r3sdfaxljnpsbn6qzq/cloudberry/3D%20Printing/New%203D%20Printers.MOV
I only have the sound of this video. I just download it an check it.
By the way - is there also a direct link to full screen playing this (and other) videos?
After download it works local.
But it does matter. more than 4GB for 7 minutes is about 10MB/s. That would saturate a 100mbit connection. In addition to that, MOV isn’t exactly a great file format for streaming. If I remember correctly this format stores video and audio separate from each other, which means Storj would have to read at 2 locations at the same time.
When I actually download the file it does download at about 10MB/s. So with a better file format for streaming, this likely would have worked with some minor buffering on fast connections. With MOV you would likely need at least twice that speed to get acceptable performance.
Of course these days there is absolutely no reason to use a file this size for a 7 minute video and even less of a reason to use a mov container for it. So yeah, I do recommend transcoding it before upload.
If you use https://link.eu1.storjshare.io/s/jxbuggi6o7r3sdfaxljnpsbn6qzq/cloudberry/3D%20Printing/New%203D%20Printers.MOV?view in Firefox, then it shows the player.
Unfortunately in other browsers the view argument still initiates a download.
Thats why I was surprised this doesn’t play on my 1gb/s connection.
I am being a little bit difficult in not reducing the size, I admit, however I’m also trying to use the service like a “normal” user.
@Jocelyn just to answer your question, yes it plays fine locally as someone else has mentioned in the comments if they downloaded the whole thing too. If @BrightSilence answer is the official Storj line then that’s totally fine, but since .mov is the format is comes out from the iPhone and even a short video is likely to be pretty large, someone may want to have a think about how the user experience can be improved on this. Perhaps not bother displaying the movie playback feature if the file is a “.mov” or the video is over a certain size threshold.
It isn’t. But there is only so much Storj can do with a file that has problems.
I just put the file on my own web server for which I have local DNS point to the local IP of the server. So that’s a 1gbps LAN connection. While the video does start, it only plays audio and starts buffering after 2 seconds of play. Clearly this format won’t play on any server with reasonable speed through a web player. There is nothing Storj can do about that.
That said. I have a 1gbps down connection and the download only went with 10MB/s, which is less than 10% of my connection speed. I’m not saying Storj can’t make more speed improvements, but I am saying they can’t make enough speed improvements to make this file stream at acceptable speed, because your own down connection isn’t even fast enough to make that happen. I’ll send you a PM with a link where you can test the file on my server with 500mbps up speed.
There is a reason why platforms like youtube always transcode files you upload. Not all file formats are fit for streaming. This isn’t so much about the file size, but about the fact that the file can’t be read sequentially in order to stream it. Instead the player needs to jump to different locations inside the file constantly and that’s what’s making it impossible to stream. I think your beef is with Apple if you want streamable files directly out of your iPhone. They simply didn’t choose a file format that can do that.
When I tried the link, sound is startng ok but no video, and after a second it breaks and starts downloading next part of the video, similar to experiences of other people before.
As i can see it is a *.mov file which is not really “made” for streaming.
If you want stream it, use some encoder like ffmpeg or something for Apple device to transcode it to *.mp4 or *.mkv or *.webm format which I think are made for streaming videos - you can set an option, so it won’t loose quality.
(unfortunately STORj is rather only starting in this feature, if at all considering this venue of video streaming - it requires special servers with lots of graphical video power to transcode videos received from “normal/inexperienced” users 
into something streamable everywhere - (opinion from my “inexperience/knowledge”)
So for now we have to do it manually and/or create own server gateways that will do it “for” us, what totally defeats the purpose of using distributed storage from the beginnig like STORj 
But maybe more streaming-friendly video formats can manage that… dunno didn’t test it.
or maybe use youtube instead 
I also have very slow connection (5Mbits) So I tried to wait for a little caching, then play it, but it doesn’t happen (or file is large enough that fills up the cache too quickly to be played without hiccups)
Good Luck! And to your efforts! 
They could utilize Videocoin for that, or enable Storj nodes to transcode.
Keep in mind that Storj DCS is a platform primarily aimed at developers. It’s a storage solution. I’m sure Storj Labs does a lot to create integrations with platforms with other capabilities, but integrating transcoding doesn’t really make much sense for the service they provide. They’re not youtube, they are the platform that something like youtube would store the videos on.
There is already such a partnership: Integrating Storj into your VideoCoin Network Workflows | by VideoCoin | VideoCoin | Medium
nodes aren’t powerful enough - imho - maybe some of them are, but most are just old computers with some old processors and a free couple hundreds of MB of HDD space.
For my own purposes I use a Nvidia 960 card (that is installed in my laptop) and it uses NVidia special dedicated encoder to transcode from raw mp4.
1hr video takes about ~15 minutes probably not best setup but that’s what I got.
I didn’t try to encode it on my processor (i7-6700 -2.5GHz installed in notebook so not very fast) - i am convinced it will take couple of times longer. Not to mention my node that is powered by some old pentium 
Using plain processors (like raspberry - “recommended” by some folks here) which are also dedicated to be power savvy… won’t cut it imho… though i don’t know how capable raspberries are. I only heard that they are useful in some use cases.
encoding videos is pretty hardware demanding…
And using third party… maybe… but I don’t think it is within scope of interest for Storj. At least not yet.
Of course you would have to parallelize it and cut the files in pieces. Videocoin claims to perform transcoding on Raspberries.
But it would be really funny if Storj would use the Videocoin resources for displaying the videos. In return, they could demand a bit more support from Videocoin to use Storj as storage (instead of Filecoin).
It would be interesting but we need to be careful about mission creep and trying to be “all things to all people”…