
Show HN: An open-source media hosting site that's anonymous and fast - jdiez17
https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/07/19/MediaCrush-for-nerds.html
======
burntsushi
Stellar work. Your openness about everything is incredibly refreshing, and
integration with RES was an awesome move. It's an easy choice to make the
switch!

I am seriously impressed. I loaded up your README on github and had your app
running within 10 minutes locally---including `gif` uploads. That's just
really nice craftsmanship that is usually missing in fresh projects. Giant
kudos to you guys.

(There were a couple trivial steps I had to do that weren't documented. I
submitted a pull request. [1])

[1] -
[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/pull/108](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/pull/108)

~~~
jdiez17
Thank you so much! It feels awesome to know you've managed to run it smoothly.
Really makes all the effort we've put into it worth it!

PS: Merged your pull request, thanks!

------
Titanous
"The only thing we store about you is your hashed IP address"

The IPv4 address namespace is so small that brute-forcing hashes would be
trivial, so this isn't an effective approach.

~~~
jdiez17
True. We use 12 rounds of bcrypt, though, so they should be at least
moderately secure. It's the best solution we've found so far... we'd be happy
to hear alternatives that allow us to generate secure hashes for the IPs and
allow us to ban people by IP if necessary.

And yes, I know that 12 rounds of bcrypt doesn't mean much. It will delay
brute force attacks, though.

~~~
samstave
Ban all .gov and .mil known IPs. Ban all IPs owned by the MIC (KBB, BAA, Etc)

~~~
superuser2
What makes you think these people aren't capable of purchasing or routing
through commercially available address space?

~~~
samstave
They are certainly capable of paying for it... the facts show though that they
are typically not good at shielding their source IP. The wikipedia edit from
the senate IP, the tracking of the SAIC IP to NSA etc...

Its not a 100% guarantee - but it's a start.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Hi, I made this site with jdiez17 over the past few months. We'd love to hear
your thoughts on our work.

------
imperialWicket
This is awesome, and I really appreciate the effort toward
privacy/transparency. Along those lines, supporting do not track is great, but
why use GA at all? Just implementation ease? Is this something you plan to
move away from?

~~~
jdiez17
Thanks!

Well, GA is quite convenient - we get pretty graphs, realtime analytics and so
on. It's not something we have considered moving away from, since it's trivial
to disable it entirely. And it's not significantly worse than any other
tracking tool.

~~~
imperialWicket
I'd say it's substantially different from hosting your own Piwik, OWA, or even
something like snowplow - where you could elect to avoid IP storage.

That said, those all entail a lot of work and/or additional cost. You're also
absolutely right that allowing users to disable it (and ads) is an amazing
feature.

~~~
philtar
I've found piwik to be unusable for large datasets

~~~
imperialWicket
How large?

Piwik is really ancillary to the discussion at hand, but I often see the claim
that Piwik can't handle busy sites, and it's important to quantify the claim.

I've had success (and others report similar behavior) with 500,000+ hits per
day. [http://piwik.org/docs/optimize/](http://piwik.org/docs/optimize/)
reports adequate support to higher levels. It's quite easy to set this up with
EC2 + RDS, and using autoscaling gets you a very resilient solution that can
easy handle those numbers. Also, in the case of mediacru.sh, many of the
optimizations have little impact since they optimize for reporting on the
already-gathered analytics. With only two analytics viewers/users - this is
not much of an issue.

If you're doing more than 1mil per day, then I think something like snowplow,
a commercial solution, or a fully custom solution are appropriate anyway.

------
przemoc
Demo page [1] uses gif made from Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! [2] anime. Was
it totally random choice or MediaCrush crew did it purposely (aside from
showing big difference)? Apparently many geeks are after anime, but sadly
overall plot-quality of them deteriorates slowly almost each year. That said,
Chu2koi was actually one of better series in 2012 Q4 (with nice visual side
too).

To be less off-topic: good job on making it, openness and finally shipping it.

    
    
      [1] https://mediacru.sh/demo
      [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_Chunibyo_%26_Other_Delusions

~~~
jdiez17
Heh, it's certainly not random choice. Sir_Cmpwn is a massive anime geek.
Personally, I'd have used a cat gif.

------
BinaryBullet
This is great!

Any plans to have an API that other products/services can use? Is it against
the TOS to post to /upload from a different domain?

I'll be working on a site soon that might allow some type of media upload.
Would it be okay to use mediacru.sh for something like that?

I could see "free hosting" getting really expensive for you guys though,
especially if you allowed hotlinking, etc.

Anyways, best of luck to you. Hopefully this becomes profitable for you.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
You're free to use our API. There's some shitty "docs" here:
[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/issues/50](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/issues/50)

~~~
BinaryBullet
Awesome. Thanks again!

------
Zanely
Hmm. Weird i tried this with two of the same MP3 files and it didn't change
the file size & quality is the same? :/ Original:
[http://151.236.11.202/mp3/2.mp3](http://151.236.11.202/mp3/2.mp3) Converted:
[http://151.236.11.202/mp3/1Vzigd0EXPo1.mp3](http://151.236.11.202/mp3/1Vzigd0EXPo1.mp3)
Any suggestions?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Actually, we don't do any processing on mp3 files yet. The following files are
compressed to the best of our ability: GIF, JPG, PNG, MP4, OGV, SVG.

Got an idea for a good way to compress mp3 files?

~~~
voltagex_
Don't.

~~~
Zanely
Well go figure it can be done with the mp4s so why not give it a try with
mp3s?

~~~
voltagex_
I'm a stickler for quality. I may be an outlier - but the future shouldn't be
in 320kbit/s

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
We aren't planning on using lossy compression. We're sticklers for quality,
too.

------
denzil_correa
It would be nice if you could convert videos from Youtube and convert them
into a GIF

------
aeon10
from what I've seen this is all free. which is ofcourse great. and open source
too. But I wonder if you guys have a business model? I mean somebody has to
pay for those servers right?

~~~
jdiez17
We don't have a business model right now. At this stage we're just trying to
build a service with the best possible experience for the users. Monetization
will come later, we can afford to pay server and bandwidth bills for now.

Our only source of income is donations and the advertisements that we show
exclusively on the home page. You can check all of our accountability at
[https://mediacru.sh/transparency](https://mediacru.sh/transparency), by the
way.

~~~
aeon10
Brilliant. I wish you guys the best of luck. I hope all of this pays off in
the end and you guys can make this awesome product profitable, because I hope
to be using this for a long time :)

------
dombili
Maybe I'm blind, but what's the file size limit?

~~~
jdiez17
25MB. That's not actually stated on the website (good catch) but you can see
it here, on the nginx config:
[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/blob/master/config/...](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/blob/master/config/nginx.conf#L41)

~~~
spindritf
Those rewrites you're using

[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/blob/master/config/...](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/blob/master/config/nginx.conf#L4&L10)
(BTW, how to hightlight two separate lines?)

are considered taxing

[http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Taxing_Rewrites](http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Taxing_Rewrites)

and you could replace them with just a "return."

I love the idea, the fact that you provide all the configs, that it's written
in python... it's a really great project.

~~~
jdiez17
Oh, didn't know about that. Well, that's the good thing about being open
source - you have some knowledge we didn't have, so submit a pull request
fixing it, I'll merge it, and we'll all be a little bit happier.

Thanks for the heads up!

------
leke
Any plans to feature a site search?

~~~
jdiez17
Nope, kind of goes against the idea - there's no way for you to "discover"
uploads to mediacrush. We don't even allow crawlers to index media pages.

