What is AutoTube ?

TL;DR: AutoTube allows you to easily publish yourself (ie without YouTube, Vimeo,...) your videos on internet.

Nowadays, you have multiple options if you want to publish a video online:


So you will ask:

Why another option to publish my videos online ?

My main motivation at the beginning of this project was the poor quality of 1080p streams on YouTube. I have some videos with a lot of movements and as YT encode with a relatively low bitrate (around 4Mbs), there is à lot of compression artifacts:

Youtube Video compression artifacts

By using AutoTube, you can select the bitrate of each stream, for example, in my case, as we have a high speed internet access at home, i configure a 1080p stream with a 8Mbs bitrate and a "fallback" stream at 4Mbs, for those who have less available bandwidth.

As development progresses and user feedback comes in, I've seen other great benefits of using AutoTube:

  • You are no longer dependant of a platform arbitrary rules and rights.
    For example, do you think it's fair that you can't use music your own for a private video that only you and your loved ones will see ? Me no.
    Do you think it's fair that a platform remove your video or worse delete your account because something doesn't respect a new rules (or a new way of thinking) even if the content respect the law ?
    Me no.

  • You are no longer linked and captive of a platform. As AutoTube works with any "web space", you have a lot of choices to host your videos. And you can easily switch between them.

  • As you can use standard web hosting plan, the cost of serving your videos is much cheaper than paid services. (We will put some example later in the doc)

  • Your viewers don't have to support ads if you don't want to, and maybe more important:
    Your content will not be polluted by unappropriated ads.
    Keep in mind that YouTube have updated their TOS to add the right to monetize any video.
    If you are using YouTube professionally, they can, for example, insert your competitor ads before your video.

Youtube Video compression artifacts

Ok but it's difficult to publish and host videos !

Yes... it was ! 😉

With AutoTube you just need an online space served via HTTP (any web hosting plan, cloud instance, dedicated server, Amazon S3, IPFS storage...) and that's it. AutoTube will do the hard part for you:

  • Encoding your video to multiple streams, with different resolutions and bitrates, in order to generate a dynamic adaptative streaming package.
  • Generate a dynamic manifest that will be served by your web server.
  • Build a package, with a HTML5 player, that will be served by your web server.
  • Uploading this package to your online space.

Take a look at the demo on the home page (all the videos on the home page have been generated by AutoTube and hosted on Scaleway S3 behind Cloudflare for CDN and cache).