I dislike Google and don't want to use Youtube, and I can't afford Vimeo; so I'm uploading my video files to my server and embedding them on my site with the HTML5 video tag. I'm trying to find the ideal balance between video quality, performance, and file size. Do guidelines, principles, or best practices exist for this?
For example I have a 6 minute video (1080 x 1920) encoded as h.264 that's 1.2GB. Is that unreasonably large? Can I compress it further without sacrificing the quality of the image? Is there such a thing as an ideal ratio for video length, quality, and file size?
Thanks in advance.
The way YouTube and similar sites work is with Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming - this produces multiple different bit rates to allow for different devices and network conditions.
You can see more details here:https://stackoverflow.com/a/42365034/334402
There are open source solutions to produce and stream ABR files, e.g. Shaka Packager: https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-packager