HackerNBlog

I have made yet another site! This time we're going inside the Tor network, with an onion service. Simple as day, http://r2uc5s7zoqhujl4lqcp3kkbicmp4qqvrzyondbdgobaqogmyvjzmvhid.onion allows you to stream Sintel or Glass Half (two Blender Open Movies, licensed under CC-BY 3.0/4.0).

Why?

Showing you streaming over Tor/onion services. And this isn't some single-hop non-anonymous onion service. There is also no HTTPS so no HTTP/2 speed boost.
Any optimizations I have done are with the videos (like using 1024p/720p h.265 versions by default. Btw, checkout the full 2048p/1080p versions, maybe the h.264 versions too).

Will you add more movies?

Probably not. But do show me some good movies you'd want me to put up, maybe I'll change my mind. Note: I won't be doing any piracy, if it's not CC, Public Domain or otherwise I have the rights to put it up, I don't care about it.

 

History (idk...)

Originally I started out by setting up for live streaming. Running nginx with rtmp which it then made into dash, OBS streamed to nginx's rtmp, and a shitty website (pretty much like now) using videojs and probably videojs-contrib-dash that would get the dash manifest and stream it. Set up tor to provide an onion and watched sintel at least 3 times while trying it out and figuring out how it worked.

Some time later I wanted to make something I could actually put up on my server (I did try the above setup with ffmpeg streaming to nginx, it just took a lot of CPU). So I spend a few days figuring out how to make streaming. Luckily it uses the same stuff: dash or hls (I now use the latter) and videojs (plus videojs-http-streaming). The hardest part was actually figuring out how to create the hls. FFMpeg can transcode an mp4 to hls, but many of the commands I found weren't exactly great. I then also had the problem that I wanted to provide more than one quality, and later I decided to I wanted to do h.265 (because of the smaller size, you can feel it when you stream it), which was also a small nightmare getting ffmpeg to create an h.265 file with video.

 

To be clear

I'm not saying people should use Tor for streaming, I'm just saying Tor really isn't as slow as you think. Or maybe I should be saying “h265 is really good”. I'll let you be the judge of that.

 

On an unrelated note, someone emailed me to ask about RSS. At the time I didn't know this, but writefreely has it built in at /feed: https://encryptionin.space/feed