I really appreciate you walking through that; it's an eye-opener! It seems like you not only deal with a considerable amount of five-minute-or-greater videos, but much higher quality than I was expecting, too.
I also like the idea of user-transcoding because, honestly, I think it's better for everyone? I would love if every place I uploaded video or audio content offered an option to "include lower-quality variants" or something. Broadly, it's my product; I should have the final say on (and take responsibility for) the end result. And for high-quality stuff, the people who make it tend to have systems equipped to do that better anyway. So they could probably get faster transcoding times by using their own systems rather than letting the server do it. Seems like a win-win, even outside of the obvious benefits of "make a whole lot of computers do only the work they each need done, instead of making a few computers do the work that everyone needs done". With the only slight downside of the "average user" having some extra options that they don't understand which cause them to use it wrong and then everyone hates your product. Yay, app development.
I think offering client side transcode as an option, with server side transcode available for those who don't want to do it client side, is compelling. I would probably do it, as I have a powerful home system that can transcode much faster than my cloud host (I do use the remote transcoding feature in Peertube though).
I really appreciate you walking through that; it's an eye-opener! It seems like you not only deal with a considerable amount of five-minute-or-greater videos, but much higher quality than I was expecting, too.
I also like the idea of user-transcoding because, honestly, I think it's better for everyone? I would love if every place I uploaded video or audio content offered an option to "include lower-quality variants" or something. Broadly, it's my product; I should have the final say on (and take responsibility for) the end result. And for high-quality stuff, the people who make it tend to have systems equipped to do that better anyway. So they could probably get faster transcoding times by using their own systems rather than letting the server do it. Seems like a win-win, even outside of the obvious benefits of "make a whole lot of computers do only the work they each need done, instead of making a few computers do the work that everyone needs done". With the only slight downside of the "average user" having some extra options that they don't understand which cause them to use it wrong and then everyone hates your product. Yay, app development.