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+Document: WM-071                                                 P. Webb
+Category: Project                                             2025.06.16
+
+                           Introducing Nickel
+
+Abstract
+
+   I just want my own YouTube, but sustainable.
+
+Body
+
+   Long story short, there aren't any video platforms that I want to use
+   or that want me as a customer, so I made my own.
+
+   1. The inspiration
+
+      Vimeo is best suited for small businesses, filmmakers, and
+      agencies. The only other realistic option? YouTube…which is a
+      Google product and I've been largely anti‑Google for at least a
+      decade. At the top of this year though, I ended my anti‑Google
+      stance to not only create a Gmail account, but create a new
+      YouTube channel as well. The idea was that I'd just use them to
+      grow my personal brand or whatever but that felt gross. I cringed
+      every time I logged in.
+
+      Around the same time, I remembered reading an article[1] where
+      someone had a **ton** of video they were storing with Cloudflare
+      and paying _pennies_. I finally re‑read the article and got the
+      confidence to try it out for myself. The idea of having my own
+      video platform always felt like an impossible dream, just out of
+      reach. Not anymore, I did it!
+
+      https://nickel.video/77C015N7N2N3[2]
+
+      Few things to note: most of the site isn't done; internal links
+      will show a nice "404, I'm working on it" message and the site is
+      NOT responsive. This is for two reasons:
+
+      1. I wanted to use this immediately
+      2. I need to get over needing projects to be "perfect" before
+         launching them
+
+      My personal deadline was the launch date of Nintendo Switch 2
+      because I wanted to film an unboxing video. My son was a
+      persistent micro‑manager during this time of immense frustration
+      because guess what? Everything worked in development but not on
+      my server…WTF?!!
+
+   2. What went wrong
+
+      I develop on an M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM. Transcoding a
+      700MB video is fast af. Deciding to do so on a server with 2GB of
+      RAM and watching my app crash again and again for no obvious (at
+      the time) reason was excrutiating. What I know NOW is that the
+      large video was being kept in memory and when memory fills up, a
+      computer will crash. I had to learn how to chunk the video from my
+      app and stream its parts to my transcoder before reassembling said
+      parts so the transcoding could actually occur before sending
+      _those_ bits to Cloudflare R2.
+
+      WHEW!
+
+      Switch 2 launched June 5th and I wasn't able to get my unboxing
+      video onto Nickel until 5 or 6 days later…not terribly bad because
+      I literally didn't know what I didn't know. I thought the 4GB
+      Linode that's currently running my transcoder was good enough but
+      I think I'll upgrade that to 8GB before I get my initial group of
+      VIPs to find edge cases for me.
+
+      Oh yeah, one of the avoidable issues I ran into was forgetting to
+      install `ffmpeg` and wondering why the transcoder API wouldn't run
+      LOL! Man, I felt like such a dummy.
+
+   3. What went well
+
+      I'm having a blast figuring things out TBQH. Much of how the
+      internet works remains a mystery to me, until I'm forced to learn
+      something to develop a feature.
+
+      For example, blob[3] URLs! They look more professional than having
+      your CDN or raw playlist files be exposed in your video source
+      tag. Transcoding is neat too! It basically creates several
+      versions of your source video in different resolutions so you can
+      serve video based on available bandwidth. I've gotta optimize my
+      `ffmpeg` config some more to optimize for size, although I want to
+      prioritize quality.
+
+      Designing the video player took a few tries. I tried using Plyr[4]
+      first but when I found that serving HLS content was proving
+      difficult with it, I found the great `hls-video-element` and
+      `media-chrome`[5] libraries. Fan‑freaking‑tastic libraries, they
+      make themeing a _breeeeeze_.
+
+      I made the video player add context when embedded[6] versus being
+      on the site (you can see the title and username of the creator,
+      along with a "NICKEL" button that'll take you to the video on the
+      site). I haven't quite managed to get video to preview within
+      Apple Messages or Discord but it seems like you need to be
+      whitelisted to make that happen anyway. Nickel won't get that
+      entitlement for quite some time (I thought adding Twitter meta
+      tags would work but they don't so I'll remove them from the
+      codebase in the next update).
+
+      Speaking of updates, I thought I'd also record a video of me
+      talking about the latest changes coming to Nickel and post under
+      the official account there. Ya gotta dogfood your projects!
+
+   4. The future
+
+      I've yet to setup a blog for Nickel so the next update or two
+      about it will likely be here on my personal blog as I get basic
+      site functionality done. I'm currently working on the pricing page
+      and will get that responsive before fixing the rest of the
+      ancillary pages.
+
+      It was important for me to have a plan for sustainability because
+      as we've all seen, ad‑supported always devolves into the worst
+      possible experience for everyone who isn't an advertiser.
+
+      It is my hope that Nickel can become the home of short‑form video
+      for at least 100,000 people; creators and the people that support
+      them. Stay tuned!
+
+      🕸️
+
+   P.S.: For the tech stack nerds, nothing's changed. I'm using Gel,
+   Deno, GraphQL, and SvelteKit (Typescript and Sass) on Linode.
+
+References
+
+   [1] <https://screencasting.com/articles/cheap-video-hosting>
+   [2] <https://nickel.video/77C015N7N2N3>
+   [3] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Blob>
+   [4] <https://plyr.io>
+   [5] <https://www.media-chrome.org/docs/en/get-started>
+   [6] <https://nickel.video/embed/e219nIE95330>