While YouTube is free (as in money) to use, the cost is paid in terms of privacy and advertising analytics. So I've decided to investigate self-hosting my video content. The Cost of YouTube With YouTube, you sacrifice privacy in favor of cost. YouTube is the very best at what they do (serve video to all resolutions and bandwidths), and they are backed by Google who is the very best at what they do (collect data in order to facilitate selling a primed audience to advertisers).

Nearly 2 years ago, I became a Cord-Cutter. I couldn’t see the sense in paying a ton of money every month for 500 channels that I didn’t watch, just so that I could catch the occasional show. I invested in Netflix and Hulu Plus accounts so that I could watch most of my shows, and for the shows that haven’t made their way into the 21 century yet, there are plenty of places online where you can acquire the latest episodes.

I often find myself wanting to watch my movies when I’m on-the-go, or sitting at work writing code. I also have one Blu-ray player in the house, and hate having to sit through one unskippable warning or commercial after another. Because of this, I choose to exercise my fair-use right to format-shift my movies into something more convenient. Making a personal backup of movies you own is in a legal gray-area in the U.S. Historically, this sort of thing fell under fair use law, but the DMCA (1998) makes it illegal to crack the encryption.

For my fellow video nerds, the ITU announced today that its members had agreed upon the format for the successor to H.264 video — H.265, also known as “High-Efficiency Video Coding”. H.264 and HDTV Today, most TVs support 1080p, although most content (TV shows, most video games) are only 720p. Blu-ray movies and a handful of video games are “Full HD” (aka, 1080p). This is all thanks to a video codec called H.264 (aka, “Advanced Video Coding”, or AVC for short).